


Letting Go

by birdflashshipper (kateshines)



Category: Batman (Comics), Nightwing (Comics), Young Justice (Cartoon), Young Justice - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Birdflash - Freeform, Fix-it fic, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Prostitution, Slow Burn, birdflash is endgame, coping with loss, dickwally, post season two, recovery from loss and addiction, this fic WILL END HAPPILY
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-18
Updated: 2018-11-13
Packaged: 2018-12-02 15:59:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 22
Words: 52,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11512686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kateshines/pseuds/birdflashshipper
Summary: On that fateful day in the Arctic, Dick Grayson's life comes crashing to pieces and he's never quite the same. He has experienced plenty of loss in his life, but nothing could possibly prepare him for the death of his best friend, Wally West. And the worst part? He's just now realizing that he's in love with him.This is a story of grief and loss, of pain and coping, and of the winding road to recovery that Dick has to take after his world falls apart under his feet.[Post-season two Birdflash fix-it fic. THIS WILL END HAPPILY!]





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story IS going to end happily. I have already written the whole story because I didn’t want to start it and then abandon it if it became too difficult for me to write, because that would leave my readers in a bad place. I intended this story to be an in-depth, slow burn fix it fic for a fandom that desperately needs it after such a disastrous season 2 (at least as far as Birdflash is concerned), therefore, I AM ending this story happily. But it will be quite the journey before we get there, so buckle up.
> 
> There is a playlist to go along with this story. Each chapter has a corresponding song. I will include a link to the playlist with each chapter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's song: Exit Wounds by The Script. (Playlist can be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/kajnsn/playlist/796vN4CzQmr7lc3ugl1kQ3).)
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: mentions of alcohol use, brief mention of prostitution, multiple references to canonical character death, language.

The first thing Dick is aware of upon his return to consciousness is the whirring noises coming from somewhere to his left. 

He keeps his eyes squeezed shut against the cold and the noise as his sluggish brain assesses how he got here. All he can remember is taking shots of the _cheapest_ shit that a client had ever presented him with before taking it up the ass. Quite roughly - like, to the point of rudeness. He would have protested, except he was drunk and he really doesn't care anymore. He tries to focus enough to check if his anus hurts, but he is still buzzing from whatever turpentine-like liquid he ingested earlier, so his body is pretty much numb. All the better. 

The whirring noises increase in volume until Dick feels a rush of air blow across his face before the noises fade. He tries to shift his head to the side and crack his eyelids open to identify the source of the sound, but promptly recoils. It’s too bright. The bulbs buzzing above his head are ear-splitting. He cries out at the sharp line of pain that shoots through his already pounding head and promptly retches against the rough concrete he’s sprawled out against, then partially blacks out for another minute. 

Dick spits blood onto the ground and slowly comes back to full consciousness. As he wipes the dust from his face, smeared into a slick mess by the sweat on his brow, he decides that this is the absolute _worst_ way to wake up. 

“Uuuuuuugh.” 

Metropolis is a lot rougher than he remembers it. 

  
**[THIRTEEN MONTHS AGO]**  
  
The League decided to honor Wally in the same way all fallen superheroes are honored – with a pedestal and a hologram in the memorial garden.

The memorial garden: the place where heroes were able to mourn their fallen comrades, long after their bodies were sent back to their families to be buried as a common civilian. When Dick visited the hallowed grounds for the first time after Wally’s death, he insisted on being alone. His teammates had offered to go with him – M’Gann, Kaldur, even the younger kids. He was trying to be strong for his teammates during the time of mourning, and he had done a commendable job so far, but he needed time to just… fall apart. Without the eyes of his teammates watching. 

He turned the corner through the forest into the clearing and saw the hologram of his best friend, the love of his life, the man who was always able to bring back the humanity inside him when he was in a dark place, and he collapsed. Twenty feet away from the hologram, he went boneless onto the ground. He left a trail of tears across the grass while he crawled, hands and knees, to the base of the memorial. 

He pulled himself up to the smooth metal pedestal that his best friend’s glowing image stood upon. “I am so sorry,” he sobbed over and over, until he wasn’t even sure what he was apologizing for. For dragging Artemis back into this life, maybe. For almost getting her killed, over and over again, and for not even regretting putting her in danger. For becoming so much like the man he never wanted to be that he ended up pushing away his best friend. For failing to locate the twenty-first chrysalis that Wally ended up giving his life to shut down. For not being able to stop it from killing him once Dick had arrived on the scene in the Bioship. For… for… 

For being such a coward that he hadn’t even been able to admit his feelings for Wally, even to himself, until Wally was already gone. 

  
He developed a habit, a month after Wally’s disappearance, of sneaking into Barry and Iris’s house. He would go into Wally’s room and throw himself onto the bed, sobbing into the comforter, huffing in the familiar scent of Wally. Pheromone-laced musk, latex, and something sweet. It was comforting as much as it was agonizing. He did this in the middle of the night when he knew neither Barry nor Iris would notice his presence. They wouldn’t want him here, he thought. It was his fault Wally was gone. 

Over the course of his frequent visits, he memorized everything inside Wally’s room. Eighty-three cents in change was in the pocket of the dirty jeans thrown haphazardly onto the worn hardwood floor. A copy of _Crime and Punishment_ , no doubt a school assignment, was dog-eared to page ninety-one. Piles of comics were scattered across his floor, some half-read, some still bagged and boarded. One day when he snuck in, he looked through the comics to find out how far Wally had gotten through each storyline. Wondering what Wally had died without knowing. 

Dick soaked up everything he could about Wally, memorized it all, as if learning these new little snippets of him would keep him alive just a little bit longer. At the end of every visit, he ended up curled up on the hardwood floor, shaking hands clutching his increasingly greasy hair from lack of proper care, face pressed into his knees, sobbing, wishing desperately that things were different. 

  
He ended up leaving the team. He decided to do it the right way – he shaved his face (for the first time in weeks), and put on his Nightwing costume. He went to the Watchtower and sought out Kaldur, all the while rehearsing the conversation in his head, unsure of how to even make the words come out right. Wondering how to make him understand. 

He stumbled over a few different phrases until he found a few to string together that made some sort of sense. “I need a break, Kaldur. You, me, Wally, we… We founded this team. Without him…” 

He didn’t even bother mentioning that Wally hadn’t been on the team for over a year, and Kaldur didn’t bother to comment on it. Dick’s reasoning was a half-truth and Kaldur knew it, but he seemed to understand - at least to some degree - because he acquiesced to his departure without too much of a fight. Dick just gave him a grateful smile, hoping it conveyed everything he wanted to say, and walked away. 

Before he left the Watchtower though, he paused in the doorway to examine the team gathered inside. They were so young. So full of life, so eager to prove themselves. They hadn’t known Wally; not really. They had heard stories about him, told with reminiscent smiles by the oldest members of the team, but they hadn’t worked with him the way the others had. They hadn’t witnessed the things he had, either. 

They would, though. Someday they would give their lives for their cause, or else watch someone they loved give theirs. They were all so prepared, at any moment, to forfeit their lives for their cause that they had never paused to think about what misery they’d leave in their wake when they did. 

“Business as usual,” he said with a bitter smile. 

  
As much as he knew quitting the team would give him a necessary break, it gave him an unnecessary amount of free time. He'd never really had free time, so he was at a loss as to how to handle it. He still patrolled Gotham with the rest of the Bats and there was never a shortage of baddies to take out, but even that was limited to nighttime hours. The days were long and full of time to himself – time to himself that left him dangerously alone with his thoughts. 

During the first few weeks after quitting the team, he took to wandering around the manor. Walking calmed him – at least he felt like he had a destination, somewhere to go – and he didn’t feel like going out in public, so the manor and the gardens were his main options. He would half-expect to hear the thunderous sound of a speedster dashing up the stairs to burst into his room, as Wally had frequently done in his youth. Hell, he had done it less than a month before he disappeared. Every time he heard a loud noise, he couldn’t help but allow a little bit of hope glimmer inside his chest as he turned towards the door. But he was always left alone, and with a hollow heart. 

It had always been clear to everyone around him that Wally was his everything, even when they were young. Wally was his first real friend, the first person he revealed his identity to, the first person he ran to when things went wrong. Everyone knew Wally meant a lot to him. They just didn’t know exactly how much. Hell - Dick himself hadn't, up until his death. 

Dick had been forced to watch as he disappeared, dissolved into nothing. He saw it with his own two eyes. But he still couldn’t let him go. He could _never_ let him go. Wally was a habit that had been ingrained within him. He couldn't stop himself from holding on. 

The speedster had frequently been up in the middle of the night (too much energy for one body, he used to say), so he had a habit of texting Dick silly things at odd hours. Even two months after Wally's death, when he woke up in the middle of the night and forgot for a blissful moment that Wally was gone, he would check his phone to see if Wally had texted him. And whenever Dick heard something funny or when something crazy happened on patrol, he couldn’t stop himself before he thought _I should tell Wally about this later_ , and then he would catch himself and heart would drop into a bucket of ice. 

He was gone. He was really gone. 

_…No._

He refused to let himself believe it. He needed to resist it, the terrible dark thoughts creeping up on him. If he didn’t resist it, if he just let himself fall into the abyss…. 

Well. He didn’t know what would happen, then. 

  
One night, on patrol, he grappled across an alleyway and swung down to the roof top, his padded boots nearly soundless as he stuck the landing flawlessly. Another habit - he couldn't _not_ move his body the right way while grappling around town any more than he could stop himself from missing Wally. He paused to get his bearings and realized that he was on the roof of the old pizza joint that he and Wally would frequent in their youth. 

Dick fell to his knees before he even knew what was happening, and began to sob as despair overtook him. Every place, every thought, somehow led back to Wally. 

Rain streamed through his hair, clumped with sweat and tousled from swinging around Gotham’s underbelly. His once-pristine Nightwing suit was faded and tattered. The comm piece in his ear had died almost two hours ago. 

The escrima sticks slipped from his grip and clattered against the concrete roof beneath his feet. The metal tips had rusted over, and the rain probably wasn’t helping. He hadn’t had to use them recently, so he had no idea if they even administered electricity properly anymore - he hadn't had cause to use them. He hadn’t fought a villain in two weeks. He had a sneaking suspicion that Bruce and Tim were intentionally keeping him away from the action while out on patrol. 

He didn’t care anymore. At this point, he was only patrolling to have something to do. Somewhere to go. His head pounded, his vision blurred, his body was cold. He sank to his knees and pounded his fists into the cold, wet cement. The only reason he knew he was crying was because the drops of water streaming down his face had gotten warmer and the salt stung his raw cheeks. 

His muscles ached. He was so weary. He used to be able to deal with this. He had a rock. He had a lightning rod to direct his energy, his emotions, his pain. 

Sometimes he got pissed at Wally for disappearing - for leaving such a hole in his soul when he walked out of his life. He punched walls. He broke a wrist and two fingers. He wrapped them up and cried into his medical kit, feeling guilty for being angry at the one thing he couldn’t live without. It wasn’t Wally’s fault, he kept telling himself. He knew what would happen as he ran after the other two Flashes – he was a physics _genius_ , he had to have known – but he had also known that there was no alternative. It was him, or literally everyone else on the planet. 

He had saved the entire world, but in doing so, Dick had lost his. 

  
He had always been easily seduced by darkness. It was part of being a Bat. All of their hero identities were born from trauma. They all had dark spots inside of them, and it’s all too easy for him to fall face-first into those dark spots when he doesn’t have a source of light. And Dick’s source of light was always Wally. 

So it was during that time that Dick had started raiding Bruce’s liquor cabinet. At first he would have a beer or two to help himself fall asleep and to stave off the horrific dreams of watching Wally die in increasingly abstract ways, then when it stopped working, he moved on to the harder stuff. A shot of bourbon or scotch before bed. A double shot of vodka after patrol. Pretty soon, he graduated to drinking straight out of the bottle, and he popped the seal earlier and earlier in the day with every passing week. 

Bruce noticed, of course. He tried to talk to Dick about it, but Dick wouldn’t hear of it. It felt nice to feel tipsy. It made him feel warm in his chest, which was a nice contrast to the coldness inside his heart that he had felt ever since the moment he had stepped out of the bioship and watched the love of his life disappear. 

Soon, he was drinking first thing in the morning and all throughout the day. He tried to have a sense of humor about it – he quipped to Tim, “You can’t drink all day if you don’t start in the morning!”, but he got the feeling that nobody else in his family thought it was funny. They didn’t, based on their expressions and the increasingly frequent interventions they tried to have for him. They sat him down, one by one, asking him to stop drinking, talking about “unhealthy coping mechanisms”, referring him to some psychiatrist or another, playing on his sense of guilt – “Wally wouldn’t want this”; “You need to be there for the team”; blah, blah, blah. He had placated them at first, pretending to listen to them and nodding along at all the right parts, but he lost interest in it after a while and began brushing them off in increasingly ill-mannered ways. 

  
And then late one evening, when Dick was sucking the last few drops from a bottle of scotch, Artemis called him. 

Figures. It just _figures_ that when he was drunk off his ass, the very last person in the entire multiverse he wanted to speak to had called him. 

...Then again, he’s drunk off his ass a lot of the time nowadays. If anyone calls him, odds are he’s going to be drunk when they do it. But he had been drinking scotch, and scotch makes him an angry drunk. She would have had better luck if she had called Dick after he had drank tequila, but Artemis of all people was probably the last lucky woman Dick had ever met. 

But nonetheless, she kept trying her luck. 

“Dick…?” 

She sounded hesitant to talk to him at first – worried that he was in a fragile state, probably. The slur in his voice probably gave him away. She sounded pretty stable herself, which made him taste bile. Dick hadn’t even been _dating_ Wally, and _he_ was the one falling apart after his death? Did she even know what she had just lost? Shouldn’t Artemis be broken, at least a little? 

He decided, fuck it, and said that exact thing to her. “You sound way too fuckin’ calm. Shouldn’t you be in mourning?” He took a deep breath, rage bubbling to the surface, before it all spilled over. “I mean, seriously! Why the FUCK aren’t you falling apart?” 

Surprisingly, she didn’t react. He wanted her to react, but she didn’t, damn her. She just sighed, like she knew he was doing it to get a rise out of her (which he was), and then she spoke with an infuriatingly calm cadence. 

“He wouldn’t want you to spiral downward like this. He was always so loving. Hell, when Wally... was about to disappear… he asked Barry to pass on words of love to me. And to his parents. He was full of love, Dick. He was always so full of love. He loved you too. He wouldn’t want this.” 

Even though he knew that she was only trying to help, having it thrown in his face that Wally hadn’t even left him a final message, whereas he had left Artemis one? It only made him feel worse. He snapped. “Who the fuck are _you_ to tell me what my best friend would want? Don’t you think I _know_? I’ve loved him longer than you’ve even _known_ him!” 

He hung up and hurled the empty bottle of scotch at the wall, watching it shatter, and then just _stared_ as the remnants of scotch dripped down the white paint to the broken glass below.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For a behind-the-scenes look at why I made some of the choices that I made while writing this chapter, check out [this Tumblr post](https://birdsgoflying.tumblr.com/post/165566140213/letting-go-ch-1-behind-the-scenes).


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's song: Sippy Cup by Melanie Martinez (Playlist can be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/kajnsn/playlist/796vN4CzQmr7lc3ugl1kQ3).)
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: alcoholism, underage drinking, sexual promiscuity, mention of canonical character death, mention of Failsafe episode

Dick had nothing to remember Wally by. 

Mount Justice, their common ground and the place where their friendship had grown to a best-friendship, was destroyed. By Dick’s own doing. Their training room where they had spent so many hours sparring, the kitchen where he had smacked so many cookies out of Wally’s freckled hands… gone. The souvenir room that held precious reminders of the missions they had completed together, the living room where they had spent so many hours watching movies and playing video games, all of it. 

Gone. 

He knew, back then, that he had to destroy it. It was part of recovering the mission. He didn’t have a choice. It was all part of the plan. 

But _fuck_ , did he now wish he hadn’t. 

He wished he hadn’t, now that his best friend was gone. 

  
Over the following weeks, Dick spiraled downwards even faster. Every time he sobered up, a new wave of grief hit him all over again, so he would find another bottle and drown himself in it. 

Bruce had started to hide the liquor from him. At first he had just locked the cabinet, which was a symbolic gesture more than anything; they both knew Dick could pick a lock. When his liquor kept disappearing though, Bruce moved it to his study and locked it in his desk. Dick went through a painful withdrawal for two days before he found it and downed half a bottle of premium scotch in an hour – making up for lost time, he internally claimed. Then, Bruce moved it to the Batcave. Dick had found it there too, only taking half a day this time, and had almost polished off the rest of his stash before Bruce figured it out. 

After that, Bruce removed the remaining liquor from the house completely. He had Alfred pour it down the drain. 

At that point, unbeknownst to Bruce, Dick had gotten a fake ID and he began to visit small liquor stores with seedy reputations that he knew wouldn’t ask too many questions, and he kept his stash in a hollowed-out part of his dresser in his bedroom. He alternated which liquor stores he visited in order to avoid someone catching on that Golden Boy Richard Grayson was buying liquor underage. The paparazzi would have a field day. Can’t have that. 

He kept his stash well-supplied for several weeks. Each time sobriety crept up on him, his mind would stray back to his conversation with Artemis. 

Wally hadn’t even left him any final words. He’d left Artemis and his parents words of love, spoken to Barry in his final moments. But he hadn’t had any message to leave for Dick. 

That hurt, almost as much as losing Wally did. And he almost didn’t even blame Wally for it, which hurt even more. They had grown distant over the past couple of years and he only had himself to blame. He had tried so hard to remove himself from the pain of unrequited love that he had ended up almost completely removing himself from Wally’s life. 

Back then, he had tried to remain friends, as much as he could. He’d video chatted with him and called him on the phone. Dick had done his best to squash down the pain of Wally leaving the team. 

But Artemis was always there. Dick would hear her talking in the background during their phone calls or she would poke her head into the frame of their video chat and greet Dick – which was welcome; she was his friend too, after all – but it was never the same as it was, back when it was just Robin and Kid Flash, best friends forever. 

He’d always felt a little bitter towards Artemis for sweeping in and taking Wally away, even before he realized the depth of his feelings for the speedster. It was only later when he realized that those feelings of bitterness extended beyond the sadness of losing his best friend; he also _envied_ her. How fucked up was that? He wanted to trade places with her. Let _her_ lead this damn mess of a team instead, while _he_ moved in with Wally and went to college and forged his own life with that stupid ray of sunshine he used to call a best friend. 

Used to. _Shit_. Anything he ever thought about Wally nowadays was always put in past tense. It felt like a bucket of cold water down his spine each time he thought the words “I loved him”. It was so fucking typical, wasn’t it? Not being able to admit his feelings, even to himself, until they had to be put in the past tense. 

It was thoughts like these that drove him to drink until he woke up in the bathtub, splattered with his own vomit, unable to remember who exactly he had shouted at the evening before. He would wander the halls of the manor each morning, clutching a bottle of half-empty something, noticing the pained looks his family would give him. He must have said something to hurt Tim the night before, he would think as Tim shuffled out of his way, avoiding eye contact and discretely brushing away a tear. Or he must have said something rude to Bruce in a fit of drunken rage, he would guess, as Bruce gave him a hardened glare and turned his office chair away from him for the obvious purpose of not having to look at his mess of a son. Even Alfred - unfailing, unflinching Alfred - had begun to distance himself. Perhaps, in his British wisdom, he knew that Dick just needed some space. Or maybe he was too busy trying to manage the chaos that Dick constantly left in his wake. He wasn’t sure. Either way, he was relieved to have the butler off his back. 

The only one he hadn’t managed to completely alienate was Jason. In Jason’s typical fashion, at least since he came back from the dead, he stayed away from the manor. He’d hardly held so much as a conversation with him since Dick had quit the team. But knew he was there. Dick would see him out of the corner of his eye during patrol – just a flash of a shiny red mask, following him silently to make sure he didn’t hurt himself. He never interfered with Dick’s business though, so he allowed it. There was a time when he would have been offended by it – he’d never liked being coddled. But that time had passed. Dick couldn’t bring himself to care anymore. 

His ex-teammates had tried to reach out to him too. Kaldur, M’Gann, Conner. They probably heard about the tense conversation he and Artemis had and were trying to help. He mostly ignored them, but after drinking the last of Bruce’s vodka, he vaguely remembered shouting at Conner over the phone before he hurled it against the wall, shattering the screen and effectively killing it. 

He didn’t bother getting another phone; he didn’t have anyone he wanted to talk to anymore anyway. 

He had stopped patrolling weeks ago, and he desperately needed to get out of the house. His solution: disappearing for days at a time, going to bars with his fake ID and getting hammered, going home with strangers - both men and women. It seemed to work for a while, but just when he had convinced himself he was fine, he’d have another nightmare. Every time he woke up in the middle of the night with fading images of flashes of lightning, streaks of red and yellow, and suddenly nothingness, he sought the bottom of another bottle and another stranger at the bar to numb himself. 

But even when he hits the bottom of the bottle, even when he beds yet another random civilian – Wally was still dead. 

He couldn't take it anymore. 

Finally he snuck into Wally’s room one last time, drunk. Dick snatched the photo of himself and Wally off the bedside table, breaking the frame and pulling out the picture, cradling it to his chest. He threw himself onto Wally’s bed and breathed in the fading scent of his best friend, now intermingled with dust, and sobbed until he hiccuped then he closed his eyes. He laid there for what felt like hours, just letting his breathing even out. 

Then, he rolled off the bed, tucked the picture into his uniform and jumped out the same window he came in. 

Then he fled town, never once looking back. 

  


_Heavy breathing._

_Pounding footsteps._

_Lightning flashes._

Wally’s memories swirl around him, mingling with the orange mass of movement he is currently immersed in. 

Images fill his eyes. 

It was the six of them. Together. Taking on the world. A group of teenage superheroes intent on proving themselves. The classic tug-of-war between “too young to be treated like an adult” and “too old to be treated like a kid”. 

It was such a rush, being in the superhero business, especially when they were among peers. Working with their older, more experienced, commanding mentors was a rush all by itself, but working with others their age held its own special kind of thrill. They didn’t have any adults to answer to, at least not until the end of the mission, and it was exhilarating. Like they were finally being taken seriously. 

Not that they didn’t have their difficulties, because they did. They messed up more often than not. But they worked through the problems together. It was nice not to be so alone, and the life of a teenage superhero could certainly be a lonely one at times. You couldn’t tell your civilian friends who you really were for fear of getting them caught in the cross-fire. You were talked down to by most of the people in your life who know your secret identity, as they are all more experienced superheroes. It was frustrating. It was just nice to be among peers without having to hide anything. 

But maybe he’s a little in over his head, he remembers thinking, as they failed mission after mission. He knew the initial high was all too sweet to last. The real world hit them like a cement truck. 

They were thrust, unprepared, into what it really meant to be a superhero when M’Gann hijacked the training simulation and made them all genuinely believe they had died. He had felt himself _really_ begin to come undone after that. It made it all the more real. He had been forced to watch his friends die. Hell, they were still psychically connected, so he hadn’t just watched; he had _felt_ them die. Suddenly, it wasn’t just about glory and inside jokes and hanging out with friends anymore. Of course they felt relief upon waking up and realizing it wasn’t real, but the undertone of dread remained. It was a realization for all of them – someday, this would actually happen. Someday, one of them would end up dying for a mission. 

But the pain they felt upon that realization was nothing compared to the pain of actually losing a teammate when that day finally came. And it was only a matter of time. They all knew the expectation – they needed to be prepared to lay down their lives the very moment it was asked of them, because they were superheroes. This was what they _did_. Their lives were not their own anymore. None of them blamed Tula for sacrificing herself. Each of them would have done it in a heartbeat, if put in her place. 

But they weren’t prepared for being on the other side of it. For being the ones who survived - facing the aftermath of one of their teammates dying. It was so much harder to be the ones left behind, Wally had thought, as he grieved with the rest of his team. The pain of losing a teammate, the pain of watching a friend grieve their fallen lover. It was almost too much. 

Wally remembers thinking, back then, that it might break him – but of course, it didn’t. People don’t break so easily. 

_People usually find a way to keep going._

That exact thought is what sticks with Wally as he sees flashes of Dick’s face from inside the orange blur surrounding him. Tears, angry eyes rimmed with red, lips pressed to a bottle, a parade of strangers that Dick allows to use his body in exchange for being used in return. 

Wally can’t tell where his own face is inside the blur that envelops him, nor can he feel the tears that he knows he's shedding.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For a behind-the-scenes look at why I made some of the choices that I made while writing this chapter, check out [this Tumblr post](https://birdsgoflying.tumblr.com/post/165600823428/letting-go-ch2-behind-the-scenes).


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's song: Habits (Stay High) by Tove Lo. This one's pretty special - this song is what inspired this fic, and the first scene that I ever wrote for this fic is in this chapter. <3 
> 
> (Playlist can be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/kajnsn/playlist/796vN4CzQmr7lc3ugl1kQ3).)
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: Mention of canonical character death, alcoholism, brief mentions of self-harming feelings, brief depictions of sexual situations, mentions of prostitution.

  
Wally has had a lot of time from inside… wherever he is… to ponder the many and varied mistakes that he’s made throughout his life. 

The first mistake that jumps out at him is leaving the team. He shouldn’t have given them up so easily. He should have known that it wouldn’t be so easy to wash his hands of the responsibility of saving the world. Because, the very moment he knew he was needed, he went running back. 

He always knew he would when he was needed. It wasn’t even a question of _if_ , but when. And when he got the call, he was ready. 

He only remembers bits and pieces of what happened in Antarctica. Maybe it was the adrenaline of the moment, maybe it’s a side effect of dying. Who knows. But he doesn’t remember much. 

Some things do stick out in his mind though. Flashes of light. Murmuring something to Barry – he can’t remember what he said, but he remembers thinking that he _knew_ his time had come so he needed to say _something_. His consciousness was fading with each strike of lightning and his blood was pumping hard, so he just sputtered out the first thing he could think of. He can only hope it had been something heartfelt and poetic and not something completely stupid. 

He knew they would need _something_ , Artemis and his parents. He knew they would need something to help them recover, and in that moment, he knew that he had to act fast because his time was up. He knew what it was like to be on the other side of it. He knew what it was like in the aftermath of a loved one dying. They would need closure, and words were the best he could offer in contribution to that. He wishes he could be there to help them through it, but that’s just not the way things work. They have to take the journey of healing on their own. Death is final. 

Or, at least he _used_ to think so. 

Wally had never really believed in the afterlife. He thought he would die, and _poof_ , fade to black. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. It’s over. Your consciousness just dissolves away and that’s that. No more Wallace Rudolph West. 

But, here he is. Wallace Rudolph West, still existing. 

He had always been a staunch believer in science, but science can’t explain where he was or why he hadn’t died when he was supposed to. He had been ready, damnit, and now he is stuck in the afterlife. Which isn’t terrible, he supposed; it’s not the hellfire and brimstone that some fanatics claim, but still. He is literally _stuck_ in this weird swirly orange-ness, and he’s pretty sure he’s still literally _dead_ , but he’s still conscious. 

He isn’t entirely sure what he’s supposed to do with that. 

He doesn’t know where his body is, and he doesn’t know if that means his consciousness had been separated from it at some point during the dying process, or what. He briefly runs through the implications of a separation between body and mind ( _So I’m dead but conscious, and that would make me a zombie – way cool – except that I don’t have a body. So does that mean I’m a ghost? Can I haunt people? Cuz I can think of a few amazing pranks to use on Hal…_ ) before giving up. He’s tired. He feels like he has been running for _years_. 

But the afterlife… it’s strange. If he was even in the afterlife, anyway; he hadn’t quite sorted that part out for _sure_ yet. There are lots of flashes of lightning, which tug at a part of his brain indicating that he should recognize it as a clue to where he is, but he feels far too tired to pursue that tendril of thought at the moment. He’ll ponder it later. 

It’s not like he doesn’t have the time. 

  
Dick purposely chose Metropolis as his new dwelling place – the last place he would ever otherwise choose to go – and traveled there by a series of cabs and trains rather than an easily-traceable Zeta tube. 

Starting a new life hadn’t proven too difficult. He got a prepaid phone and a rent-by-the-week apartment. He had brought a modest stack of cash with him; just enough to get himself started. He didn’t want to bring credit cards - too much of a paper trail. He didn’t want Bruce to find him. He needed space. 

He gave a weak attempt at sobering up once he arrived in his new city, lasting all of four hours, before hitting up the first bar he came across. Two blocks from his apartment. Close enough to safely stumble back home after getting wasted. 

He figured that at least this way, he was drinking with other people rather than getting shitfaced by himself at home. 

One night, four drinks in at his usual bar, a man approached his table holding two glasses. “Mind if I join you?” he asked, pushing one of them toward Dick. 

Dick looked him over – dimpled smile, auburn hair, tailored suit – and nodded his consent. He was clean-cut and handsome, only a little older than Dick. The man offered a shy smile. “My… “date”… for the evening bailed on me. I was supposed to meet him here. Are you… are you free for an hour or two? I’ll pay.” 

Assuming he meant ‘pay for the drinks’, Dick nodded and tossed him a tiny smile. The guy seemed nice enough, and he was easy on the eyes. He could use some company. Besides, his stash of cash was running out. Having someone pay for his drinks for a while would be a welcome event. 

Dick held his hand out. “Richard.” 

The man took the outstretched wrist and pressed a kiss to the top of his hand. “Daniel.” 

After a brief period of flirting and sexual banter, Daniel invited him back to his hotel room. Already drunk and in the mood for a rough fuck, he agreed, and offered to take him to his apartment instead since it was closer. The man looked surprised, but agreed. 

Before he knew it, the man had sprawled Dick out across his bed and was eight inches up his ass. 

Dick enjoyed it well enough, and after he came, he passed out from the exhaustion and over-consumption of liquor. He slept better than he had in a while. 

When he woke up the next morning, Daniel was nowhere to be found, but he noticed a neat pile of hundred dollar bills on his bedside table. 

_Huh. Weird._

They weren’t strewn about like they had been accidentally dropped - they looked like they had been put there on purpose. They were stacked, one on top of the other, with an empty bottle as a make-shift paperweight. He tentatively picked them up and shuffled through them. Five hundred dollars. Holy shit. 

Running his hand through his hair, he thought back on the evening’s proceedings and blearily remembered the man stating that his date had bailed on him. Something about the way the man had emphasized the word “date”… and the man had asked him if he was free for an hour or two, and had offered to pay him… 

_…Ohhhhhhh._

The man thought Dick was a _prostitute_. 

Dick felt torn between flattery and revulsion. 

  
Wally isn’t even sure how long he’s been dead, but being so constantly alone with his thoughts has given him a lot of time to reflect. It forces him to come to terms with a lot of things he would have otherwise stayed in his infamous denial over. He can practically hear Black Canary’s voice in his ear: “You’re in denial, Wally.” 

His response back then had been, “I’m comfortable with that.” Maybe it’s how much he’s matured since the first time she spoke that phrase for him, or maybe it’s just that being alone with his thoughts for so long is forcing him to see things from a different perspective. But one thing is for sure – he is no longer comfortable with being in denial. 

Take leaving the team, for instance. He knows for a fact that he would have never admitted that leaving the team was a mistake if he hadn’t been forced to sit here and just _think_ for however long he has been stuck… wherever he is. But looking back, after life as he knew it had ended, he realizes that leaving the team was a huge mistake. 

He’s now made several other similar realizations. 

For instance. 

If his first mistake was leaving the team, his second mistake was staying with Artemis for as long as he had. 

He always starts that train of thought with a _but_. It was a mistake to stay together for as long as they had, _but_. Artemis is great. Wonderful. Fantastic, even. 

_But_ , he now realizes after a period of forced self-reflection, he and Artemis had absolutely no business being together. 

Sure, they got along great. They were awesome with sarcastic banter - not as great as he and Dick were, but not everyone can have that kind of connection, he figures. And they had been together for five years and they hadn’t killed each other yet, which was a plus. 

But he has started to realize that the only reason he and Artemis had stayed together for so long was because they were both too afraid to leave. 

Their relationship was fireworks at first. It was new and exciting. She was his first everything – first kiss, first girlfriend, first sexual partner, first experience living with a member of the opposite sex that wasn’t his mom or aunt. Had things continued the way they were, she would have been his first fiancée and wife. 

But after some distance, he searches his memories and realizes that they were only holding each other back. 

It’s funny how dying gives you a little perspective. 

  
In his drunken state, Dick had apparently given Daniel his phone number, because he got a call from him the next evening asking him to meet up again. He considered turning him down, because he was a little put off by the guy assuming he was a prostitute, but then he shrugged and decided it couldn’t hurt to fuck him again. Daniel was, at the very least, good at it. It also helped that he was halfway through a bottle of vodka when he got the call. 

He ended up meeting him at a motel, and an hour and a half later, walked out with another handful of hundred dollar bills. 

He got a few more calls over the following week, all resulting in walking away with a stack of cash. He used part of it to pay his rent, part to pay for the bare minimum of groceries, and used the rest to drink himself to numbness. After a while, the bar became too expensive and he resorted to buying cheap bottles of whatever was available and getting drunk alone in the apartment. After a few weeks of this, he started getting calls from Daniel’s friends too. Apparently he was such a good lay that he was being referred out. Interesting. 

He took it all in stride, his drinking problem having only gotten worse, and met up with each of them in turn. At least it was helping him to pay his rent. He wanted to stay independent of Bruce as long as possible so he could have some time to distance himself and just _breathe_ , and working a cash-only operation helped him stay off the grid. 

He came from a family of detectives. In order to stay hidden, he _needed_ to stay cash-only. 

  
He slipped into a comfortable routine over the following months. Wake up, drink, answer some calls. He had anywhere from three to six clients in one day. 

The six client days were hard. At first he enjoyed the physical act. It was a nice release. He could only get off with the first or second client though; after that, between the booze and the physical exertion, it just wasn’t possible. Once his clients started to figure that out, he had some of them specifically requesting to be his first stop of the day just so they could get him off. He began to resent that, for reasons he couldn’t quite understand. As time went on, he felt himself grow less and less interested in sex. 

Still, he kept the same pace. Anyone who called, he met up with. No request was too outrageous. He let his clients fuck him rough. He let them hold him down and pull his asscheeks apart, spreading him open, then plunge their cock inside. He let them pull his hair and spank his ass until it was raw and red. The pain set his nerve endings on fire. He tells himself that at least this way, he’s in charge of his pain. At least he _feels_ something. 

A short while later, he had an excess of cash. He re-invested it in satellite TV and better booze. Thoughts of leaving Metropolis to go back to Gotham had long since left his mind. There was no turning back. Gotham wasn’t his home anymore. 

  
When Wally really focuses his thoughts and searches the orange swirling orb around him, he can see flashes of his friends and family’s lives as they carry on without him. 

Iris sits on his empty bed in his abandoned room in their house and smooths out his sheets and just stares at the wall in disbelief. 

When a TV reporter asks The Flash where Kid Flash is, Wally watches Barry punch through the wall of a brick bank and dash away. 

(He can’t bring himself to see his parents, for reasons that he isn’t ready to delve into yet.) 

He sees M’Gann as she cries and Connor comforts her – as best he was able to, anyway; emotions were never his strong suit. 

He sees Kaldur struggling to pick up the pieces of the team after Dick leaves. 

He sees the newer members, too. Those who didn’t know him well yet, or even at all, before he disappeared. He sees their confusion and helplessness as they watch the older members of the team – the people they have grown to look up to, even idolize – grieve. He watches it dawn on each of their faces as they realize, as Wally once had, that they would someday do this too. Someday, this would happen to one of them. 

Artemis grieves too. In her own unique way, of course. She had grown up in such an environment that, once you fall down, everyone around you will kick you while you’re down if you don’t immediately bounce back up. Such was her way of life, and it is reflected in the way she grieves. So when Artemis picks up her old mantle of Tigress and throws herself into helping Kaldur pick up their crumbling mess of a team, he doesn’t blame her. That’s just how she handles grief and loss in her life, and she’d had more than her fair share of experience in both at this point. It’s a reflex for her – get up, dust yourself off, and move on. 

They had talked about this, after all, before Artemis had rejoined the team for the undercover mission with Kaldur. They had both agreed that if anything happened to the other, they would take time to grieve in whatever way they needed, and then they would get up and move on. They both knew the risks. They both knew that one of them could end up dying, and they agreed that it shouldn’t keep the other from living. She’s just holding up her end of the bargain. He’s proud of her. 

And some time later, when he peers through the orange swirl and sees Artemis kissing Kaldur, he can honestly say he’s relieved.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For a behind-the-scenes look at why I made some of the choices that I made while writing this chapter, check out [this Tumblr post](https://birdsgoflying.tumblr.com/post/165662998053/letting-go-ch3-behind-the-scenes).


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's song: Hotel Ceiling by Rixton. (Playlist can be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/kajnsn/playlist/796vN4CzQmr7lc3ugl1kQ3).)
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: multiple references to canonical character death, prostitution, self-destructive behavior, anal sex without proper preparation, grief and mourning, unhealthy coping mechanisms.

The first thing you start to forget after you lose a loved one is the sound of their voice. 

Dick would never forget what Wally looked like. He had pictures. And even if he didn’t have pictures of his own, there were plenty of photos online of Kid Flash in action. Besides - he could never forget Wally’s red hair, his freckles, and his piercing green eyes. He dreams about them every night. 

He would never forget the jokes he told. Some of them were so bad that he would cringe as he laughed – chemistry puns, terrible pick-up lines, always at the absolute worst possible time. But that was part of Wally’s charm – he knew how to diffuse the tension, no matter the source. Dick’s heart had always fluttered just a little bit when Wally would use some terrible pick-up line on him to break up a tense moment. 

But his voice. 

The only way he could hear his voice anymore was by calling his phone and hearing his voice mail message – _“Hey, this is the Wall-Man! I’m probably off saving the world, so I can’t answer the phone right now. Leave me a message!”_

Dick had been with him when he had set his voicemail message, all those years ago. He had been sixteen when he recorded it, and Wally had thought it was so damn _funny_ at the time. He’d thought he was so clever. Upon hearing his voicemail, most people would assume he was just being Wally, but those who knew his secret identity knew that it was probably pretty accurate. Wally liked making jokes like that – jokes that worked on two levels. He was always smarter than everyone gave him credit for. 

Two months after he moved to Metropolis, Dick hacked into his phone carrier account and started paying Wally’s phone bill. He needed a way to hear his voice. 

When he calls Wally’s phone and hears the recorded message, it makes it easier for him to remember what he sounded like saying other things, like “Hey, Rob! I missed ya!” and “I’ll be back in a flash!” 

It makes it a little bit easier for him to believe it was true. Maybe Wally really _was_ just off saving the world somewhere. Maybe Wally really _was_ just busy taking care of a crisis in Central City. Or Keystone. Maybe he _was_ off-world with one of the Lanterns and couldn’t get to his phone. 

Deep down, he knew it wasn’t true. Before Antarctica, Wally hadn’t donned the cowl in a year and a half, aside from the one incident with Bart. He and Artemis had quit the team because they had seen what it does to a person to watch their loved one die on the job. 

The irony of that was not lost on Dick. Wally had quit specifically so he didn’t die on the job. And still, he had given up his life to save the world like the damn hero he was. 

  
A blinding headache and a dry tongue greeted Dick as he arose on a Thursday morning. His first client that day has historically been a dominant man, but he told Dick as soon as he had walked in the door that he just wanted to sit back and take it instead. Afraid he was going to ask him to fuck him, Dick crawled on top of him and began what he hoped was a tantalizing show of preparing himself, slipping his fingers inside his hole and stretching himself out, and promised the man he would ride his cock like his life depended on it. 

He wasn’t usually particular about how he engaged with his clients. He always bottomed, but it wasn’t like he was morally opposed to topping. He just didn’t think he could physically get it up anymore. 

He was really up for anything he was physically capable of doing though, and some of them had some very bizarre requests. One of them had asked him to bathe in an ice bath and then lie really still on the bed. Necrophilia kink, he assumed. Another one asked him to wear a lacy dress and call him “daddy”. Yet another had asked him to choke him. He completed his objective in each circumstance. He really didn’t care how it went down as long as he got paid. 

Money wasn’t what interested him, though. He’d had more money than he knew what to do with, provided for by Bruce Wayne itself, since he was nine. 

What he was after was the freedom. The freedom to come and go as he wanted. The freedom to make his mistakes without the paparazzi or Bruce there to catch him. The freedom to fall apart, in whatever way he damn well pleased, without anyone there to judge him. 

The self-destructive streak in him wasn’t new. Maybe it had been there since birth, or maybe it had something to do with his early childhood trauma. It almost definitely had something to do with being a Bat, though. At least, if the other three Bats – Bruce, Tim and Jason - were any indication, it did. All three of them had a self-destructive streak; it just manifested in different ways in each of them. Whether it caused them to _become_ a bat or came as a result of _being_ a bat, he couldn’t say; he wasn’t sure which direction the causality went. He just knew it was there, for better or for worse. 

  
Dick was fairly confident he still had hickies from his first client when he knocked on the second client’s door, but he wasn’t sure. His apartment didn’t have a mirror. 

Maybe that was for the best. He probably looked like shit. 

His second client turned out to be somewhat of a cruel man, he disassociatively noted, as he held him down with a bruising grip and fucked him so hard he could feel his anus start to tear. He was glad he was still loose from his first client, because the man hadn’t seemed at all interested in preparing him; three minutes after Dick had arrived, he had unceremoniously shoved his cock inside him, causing Dick to bite his lip in pain. He tasted blood, but he didn’t say anything. 

Once his “date” had squirted his cum inside him, Dick took a moment to clean himself up in the man’s bathroom. He rarely used his clients’ bathrooms - it felt too _domestic_ , too _familiar_ , too _assuming_ \- but his ass was leaking cum and most likely blood, and he didn’t want to ruin his pants. They were his only clean pair at the moment. 

Somewhere between stepping inside the bathroom and making a mental note to ignore this guy’s calls from then on, he got a call from another regular who offered to pick him up and take him to dinner before they went back to his place. He agreed and upon hanging up, gave himself a thorough cleaning; while there weren’t clear-cut rules for this sort of thing, he thought it rude to fuck a client when there was still yet another client’s cum inside him. Just as Dick had collected the money from the night stand and left the man’s house, the other man pulled up in his car. 

This one was nice. He was easy. Honestly, half the time he just wanted to cuddle. He was lonely, Dick supposed, and yearned for human contact. He was thankful for it on this particular day. It gave his asshole a much-needed break. And true to his word, the man treated him to dinner. Guys like him made it bearable. He could almost say he liked the guy. 

He didn’t like any of them though. There were some that he didn’t _hate_ , but he couldn’t say he _liked_ any one of them. No matter what they looked like, no matter what they did to him, he would still taste bile as they fucked him. 

  
Dick had always loved Wally’s voice. It was like slipping into a warm bath. Familiar. Comfortable. Comforting. Even in the worst moments, hearing Wally’s voice could always make him feel better. After a mission that hit home a little too hard. The alien feeling in your own body after a near-death experience. After Tula died. After Wally left the team. After Jason died. Wally’s voice always brought him back down to where things felt comfortable. Where they felt normal. Where it felt like he could pick himself up and eventually feel okay again. It felt like home. 

He couldn’t stand the idea of losing that last piece of him… his voice. 

Paying Wally’s phone bill was a consistent monthly thing now. To keep Bruce or Tim from finding a paper trail, he had established an entire routine around it. Buy the prepaid credit card (less of a chance of it being traced back to him than using a regular credit card), register it, go online using a hidden IP address, and pay it. That way, he could keep hearing Wally’s voice. 

_“Hey, this is the Wall-Man! I’m probably off saving the world, so I can’t answer the phone right now. Leave me a message!”_

But one month, he forgot to pay the phone bill. He had been drunk for a week straight and by the time he sobered up, it was too late. His account had been suspended. By the time he got it set back up, the voicemail message had reset. 

He couldn’t hear his voice anymore. 

Later on that evening, when Dick was watching a re-run of an old ‘90s movie, one of the characters on screen said the phrase “If you’re going, I’m going.” 

He threw his fist through the drywall and broke down into tears. 

  
Wally feels sluggish. Exhausted. Like a blur. He’s running – or is he? He just knows he’s moving his feet really, really fast. 

…Wait, are those blurs really his _feet_? Then where are his legs? 

He traced the blurs underneath him to the concentration of red a little ways up. 

Hm. _That_ must be his legs. His uniform had red leggings back when he was alive, right? Or were they yellow? He can't remember. 

Almost as if playing some childish game, he forces himself to concentrate so he can identify each part of his body, slowly becoming conscious of the rest of his body amongst the blur of movement surrounding him. He isn’t sure how long it takes him, but it feels like a lifetime. 

Feet.  
Ankles.  
Calves.  
Knees.  
Thighs.  
Hips.  
Abdomen.  
Chest.  
Shoulders.  
Neck.  
Head. 

Well, wherever he is, his body’s still there. At least he made it through death in one piece. 

Testing out his newly-discovered body, he tenses his muscles and relaxes them again. He feels an ache in a place that he now knows to be his thighs. How long has he been running? What is he even running towards? He makes an effort to slow down but feels himself teeter off-balance, so he does the trick Uncle Barry had taught him and speeds up a bit to steady his momentum. Then, very carefully, he focuses on moving his legs a little slower, and a little slower, until he comes to what most people would consider a “normal” running pace. 

He’s in some sort of city that looks familiar, but it has this hazy off-color quality to it. Almost like he’s looking through the whole city with orange-tinted lenses on. And there’s lightning. A weird amount of lightning. It almost reminds him of... 

… _Oh._

The speed force. 

He’s in the _speed force_. 

He’s not dead, he’s in the fucking _speed force_! 

His brief moment of elation at figuring out where he is, however, disappears once he realizes he doesn’t know how to get back out. 

  
Dick had lost count of how long he had been in Metropolis. The days were all blending together. 

He thought maybe he had been there too long, though, after a mix-up at a night club. A stranger at the bar asked him to meet up with him the next day, and out of habit, Dick gave his usual flirtatious smile and said “Just name the time and place, sugar.” The man smiled and asked to meet up at a trendy new club down the block, and Dick was momentarily confused. Did the guy want to fuck in public? He was usually up for anything, but he wasn’t too keen on getting arrested for public indecency. Regardless, Dick agreed, and met up with him the next day. They danced and drank together for a bit before he took Dick back to his apartment and fucked him. 

Much to Dick’s embarrassment, when he asked for payment during the afterglow, the man had no idea that Dick was a prostitute. As he slunk out the door, he reflected on how strange his life had become when he hadn’t even considered that the man might have wanted anything from him other than sex for money. 

That awkward conversation had, obviously, effectively ruined their date. He never saw him again. 

  
Wally develops a habit of passing his time by focusing his thoughts and spying on his loved ones’ lives. As time goes on, he gets even better at it. Where he once saw fleeting images – faces he recognizes, snippets of voices – he can now see entire scenes happening in front of him. It’s like watching some sort of really messed-up movie of his loved ones grieving over him. 

It is, in a word, painful. Watching his loved ones in pain and not being able to do anything about it is truly awful. 

Especially so with Dick. 

He had honestly put off spying on him for a while. After the first snapshot of his best friend’s misery, he couldn’t bring himself to do it again for a long stretch of time. 

Even in the beginning he somehow knew that out of everyone he had left behind, Dick would have the most extreme reaction to his death. That’s why he hadn’t been able to leave any final parting words for him. He’d had no idea what to say. Artemis and his parents? They were easy. But with Dick… 

Well. What he had wanted to say to him was so complicated, and he’d had no idea how to make it come out right. What he wanted to say, he realized after a long period of reflection, was that he loved Dick. He loved him back then, when they were Kid Flash and Robin, and he loved him still as just Wally and Dick. He still isn’t sure how and to what extent he loves him, but all he knows is that his love for Dick is a force of nature inside of him; pure and unconditional. 

He knew that Dick would fare the worst after his passing. But even that knowledge left him utterly unprepared for how he would feel when he finally decided to check in on his best friend. 

For the first time in a long time, he does, and Dick is clearly mid-coitus. 

With a man. 

Wally can’t say he’s surprised; he has always had suspicions. But what _does_ surprise him is watching as Dick’s partner finishes and Dick stand up, unceremoniously throw on his clothes, take the money off the bedside table and walk out the door with a “See you next Thursday”. 

Dick had always been a very physical guy, but at least while Wally was alive, he hadn’t known Dick to be so promiscuous. He’d had his share of flings, but more often than not, he had been in a series of committed and exclusive relationships. From what he saw back when he was alive, sex was more about intimacy than the physical act of just sex. But this? This is strange. This feels… mechanical. It lacks the sensuality that he had always imagined Dick would have with his lovers. 

Then, he watches it happen again. Same routine, different man – get him off, grab the money, put clothes back on, and leave. 

And then it dawns on him. 

_Dick is a prostitute._

Wally watches in horror. _Where are Bruce and the others? Shouldn’t they be putting a stop to this?_ Wally knows enough about Bruce Wayne to know that nothing that happens in Gotham gets past him. _Why isn’t he doing something about this?_

Wally gets his answer when he realizes that Dick isn’t in Gotham anymore. Wally somewhat recognizes the skyline, but he can’t quite put his finger on what city he’s in. Everything has a warm, fuzzy orange quality to it. It makes Dick’s hair look red, which would amuse him if he didn't realize it while Dick had some stranger’s cock down his throat. 

_Why are you doing this?_ , he thinks over and over. _What happened to make you do this to yourself?_


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's song: human by Christina Perri. (Playlist can be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/kajnsn/playlist/796vN4CzQmr7lc3ugl1kQ3).)
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: alcoholism, references to canonical character death, brief mention of drug use, prostitution, language

Every time Wally breaks through the orange blur of the Speed Force to visit his loved ones, he gets better at it. He gets through the blur faster and can stay there for longer periods of time. The images get clearer, bigger. Less orange and more saturation of other colors. 

Soon, rather than watching them interact as if they are on a movie screen, he can actually _step into_ the scene. Walk around in it. See everything in three dimensions again. It’s almost like being alive, except nobody can see or hear him. And, as soon as his concentration breaks, he is sucked back out of the scene. 

He’s tried talking to them, calling out to them, touching them, pushing around inanimate objects to get their attention. He figures that’s what ghosts do, right? They can make things move around? Trashy reality TV had been his favorite hobby after retiring from the team, and he had seen enough of those stupid ghost-hunting shows to know the clichés. He almost rolls his eyes at himself because he’s _actually testing out a hypothesis that he is a ghost_ , which is not something he ever thought he would say. 

But regardless of how ridiculous, he tests his hypothesis. He tries to push a lamp over, and slam a door, and poke Barry in the back of the head. It doesn’t work, which confirms another theory that he has been forming that the Speed Force is some sort of different dimension – a dimension just barely removed from reality. Or rather, what the living _perceive_ to be reality. There might be a reality beyond that one, too. And one beyond that, and yet another beyond that. 

As his thoughts become increasingly distracted by metaphysical theory, his concentration is broken and he is sucked back into the Speed Force and away from the images of his loved ones. 

He huffs in frustration. 

He forces himself to take ten slow breaths and relax, refocuses his mind, and dives back into the orange fuzz. 

He focuses his mind on Artemis – he sees her face, her smile, he hears her voice in his mind – and then he is there, in front of her. 

He flinches as soon as he steps into the scene. Artemis is crying. Not just crying, but _crying_ \- tears streaming down her face, eyes puffy and red, hiccuping, struggling to breathe. 

He wants to rush towards her, to grab her by the shoulders and shake her, tell her everything is going to be okay. But he knows he can’t do anything to help. He can’t even hold her. He has to just watch, helpless. He pulls away from the scene slightly, miserable. 

And then, as he allows his line of vision to zoom outwards, he sees Kaldur. His leader. His friend. Kaldur and Artemis are sitting together on the couch in what was once their apartment. Artemis’s hair is pulled back and she’s in sweats and a crop top. Wally knows this outfit – it’s her “lazy Saturday” outfit. Kaldur is wearing his Aqualad suit. He must have just come from a mission, because he looks pretty beat up. A gash is across his shoulder and his temple is bleeding. 

But all the same, he holds Artemis while sobs wrack her petite frame. 

Wally focuses in again and hears her say, amidst her sobs, “I feel so guilty, Kaldur. Falling in love with you feels like I’m betraying him, you know? Like… if I move on, if I’m with you… it means I’ve finally given up on him. I feel disloyal. I feel… ashamed. Of myself. Of my love for Wally, like it’s not strong enough to…” she hiccups on her words, “strong enough to c-conquer death… I… I feel like I’ve b-betrayed him. I feel like I’ve killed him.” 

Devastation fills Wally. He wants to scream out _I’m so proud of you! Please don’t hold back! Don’t hold back from loving someone, not because of me!_ as Artemis whimpers. Kaldur comforts her with all the right words, and of course he does; he, above anyone else, can relate to how she feels. He’s been exactly where she is now. He had lost Tula two years before Wally’s death. 

Kaldur and Artemis have a lot in common now. Certainly more than Wally and Artemis ever had. 

Kaldur murmurs reassurances into her ear. “Artemis, loving me does not mean you love Wally any less. One love does not replace another. The heart does not have a set limit of love to give. I would never ask you to stop loving Wally, just as I can never stop loving Tula. They live on in our memories. I would never seek to replace Wally nor what you had with him.” 

Artemis smiles up at him through her tears and kisses him, full-force, all raw passion and love. Kaldur runs his hands through her hair and holds her tight, pulling her body in close as if trying to protect her from the pain of the world, of which she has already seen far too much. And in that moment, in spite of Artemis’s earlier emotional turmoil, she seems… content. She seems at peace. 

Wally and Artemis had been holding each other back. Seeing her with Kaldur only proves it in his mind. She looks so _happy_ with him, in a way that she hadn’t been for years with Wally. 

And every ounce of stubbornness, possessiveness, or jealousy that he would have otherwise felt at this realization? Gone. 

Artemis isn’t _his_ anymore. 

Perhaps she was never his to begin with. You can’t really own a person, anyway. Thinking of her as ‘his’ is kinda messed up, now that he really thinks about it – a relationship means consistently _choosing_ to be with the person, day after day, in spite of the overwhelming odds. It means consciously giving that person your all. It means being with that person because you choose to be, not because you have to be. Ownership has nothing to do with it. 

Artemis is better suited for Kaldur. 

And you know what? 

In that moment, he realizes he’s okay with that. 

  
Dick’s regulars love his physical flexibility. It makes it easier for them to twist and contort into the odd positions they had always wanted to try with their wives but were too afraid to ask for. Many even compliment him on it and give him a few extra bills as a tip. 

Some of them are surprisingly kind. On days when he is looking particularly ragged, they remind him to eat. A couple of them have a habit of bringing him a glass of water after they finish. One client even brought him dinner and insisted that he eat before they fucked. That was nice. 

Still, he had to fight down the urge to vomit whenever one of them shoved their cock down his throat and called him his bitch. 

The worst ones were the men who insisted that he call them “master” and ask him to beg for them to hit him, bruise up his skin, and they laugh at his frail reactions to their forceful contact. He wasn’t very familiar with the BDSM community, but he knew it wasn’t supposed to be quite like _this_. Sure, it involves pain, but it’s never supposed to go past the pleasure point. And it was also supposed to involve a manner of trust between partners, which he certainly didn’t have with any of his clients. It just wasn’t proper to engage in that kind of sexual exploration with someone who you are paying. It creates an unfair power dynamic. 

His clients didn’t seem to care much about propriety, though, because some of them hit him hard enough to bruise. He looked like he had started the vigilante lifestyle all over again on nights with those clients. Black eyes, bruised ribs, handprints around his throat. He had to start using concealer to cover up some of the marks, but he eventually gave up on it. He would have to cover up half of his body at this point. 

Dick never got off with his clients anymore. It was a point of pride for him; a way to set himself above them. _Look at them_ , he would think; _these lowly, lust-driven beings, writhing on top of me, behind me, inside of me. So pathetic._ He hadn’t even achieved so much as a semi-erect penis in months. He couldn’t even remember the last time he had gotten off, he felt such derision for his clients now. 

In a rare moment of interest, Dick once asked one of his regulars how he affords prostitutes – it wasn’t a cheap hobby, after all, and Dick knew he wasn’t the only callboy he saw. The man eyed him and simply stated that he made “sound investments” in the stock market in the past. 

Dick didn’t bother hiding his scoff at that statement. _He doesn’t **really** think I’m that fucking dumb, does he? _ ‘Sound investments’? Pfft. Yeah. In heroin and cocaine, maybe, but he doubted the man had ever stooped to investing in something as legal as _stocks_. 

Some of his clients were just lonely businessmen, but he estimated that a majority of them were drug lords and gang leaders. There was even one occasion when a client offered him drugs before they fucked. If it was the Dick back from Gotham that had received the offer, he would have immediately refused and left the scene. Probably after beating the thug up and putting in an anonymous call to the police. But this wasn’t the same Dick from Gotham; this was Richard, the prostitute from Metropolis, and he was already so drunk and sore from the last three clients that he just shrugged and followed the other man’s lead, snorting the substance off the table with a rolled-up dollar bill. 

He didn’t remember much about the rest of the night. All he remembered was feeling a rush in his body, feeling a buzzing sensation, like a caffeine buzz but a million times more intense. He remembered feeling euphoria and a self-confidence that even in his best years he had never before possessed. 

The rest of the night was a blur. 

He woke up the next morning unable to remember his own name or how old he was. He rolled over and forced himself to take a deep breath and _think_. 

_My name... Richard Grayson. Dick. That’s right. Bruce Wayne adopted me. I’m Robin._

_How old am I? Am I fifteen? No, I can’t be fifteen. I’m not Robin anymore. I’m Nightwing now – I am at least sixteen._

_Am I seventeen? No, Wally has already left the team; I’m at least eighteen. Am I -_

_Oh._

_Nineteen._

_Right. I am nineteen._

_I am nineteen, I am in Metropolis, and Wally is dead._

Facing the realization all over again that he had lost the love of his life – experiencing the pain, fresh and renewed, all over again for a second time – was the worst kind of withdrawal. 

He had forgotten, for one blissful moment. He had forgotten what happened. He had forgotten about Antarctica and those flashes of lightning that claimed his best friend. He had forgotten about leaving the team, about pushing away his family, about moving to Metropolis. The alcohol and the calls he answered. 

He rolled out of bed – how had he even gotten back home? – and dusted himself off. He refused to allow himself time to regret the decisions that had led him to where he is. Regret or not, he was there. He took a swig from his bottle of vodka and walked out the door to begin another day of fucking strangers and pretending to enjoy it. 

He never touched drugs again. 

He kept drinking though. Most mornings, he woke up feeling like a wrung-out towel. Used up, cold, and washed out. While at first he was chasing the rush, it was harder and harder to reach these days. The race to the finish line kept growing longer and longer until he was left chasing nothing but numbness. 

Honestly, he didn’t even know why he did it anymore. He didn’t know why he sold his body. Sure, freedom. But he just drank all of his money away anyway. 

Dick couldn’t identify the exact point when it had gone wrong – when it went from thrill-seeking self-destructive catharsis, to the mess that he was in now. But of one thing, he was certain: the thing that he had once called a “routine” had started to look an awful lot like an addiction. 

  
And one day, his routine was broken. 

Dick got a call just as he was finishing up with his fourth client of the night from a number he didn’t recognize. A referral from one of his new clients; that was always nice. He must have been a decent fuck, then. After a few minutes on the phone, he got an address of where to meet him. 

He took a taxi over to the requested location – a seedy motel; one of the few in his area of the city that he had never been to before; the kind that didn’t even have a lobby, just doors to each motel room leading to the outside world – and banged his fist against the peeling paint on the door. He heard strong strides across the room and heard the floor boards creak with each step. 

Great, must be a bigger guy. That’s good. The heavier ones don’t usually last as long. He shuffled his foot against the worn cement floor and mentally calculated how long it would take for him to get this guy off so he could hit up his favorite bar later, maybe meet up with Daniel again. Daniel had been a consistent presence in his life. Consistency was nice. He couldn’t say he _liked_ the guy, but he didn’t _hate_ him. 

His reverie was broken as he saw the knob turn and the door opened with a low squeak. Dick brought his gaze up from the rusty doorknob and, in spite of being half-drunk and exhausted to the point of apathy, his jaw fell. 

Staring him down from the other side of the door frame was a _very_ familiar pair of eyes. The last pair of eyes that he would have ever expected to see peering at him from the other side of the door. They looked so out of place that Dick’s brain stalled for a moment before he stuttered, “W-what are you doing here?” 

From the other side of the door frame, Jason Todd cocked one eyebrow at him, looking thoroughly unimpressed. “I can’t believe you made me track you all the way to fuckin’ _Metropolis_.” 


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's song: Talk by Coldplay (Playlist can be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/kajnsn/playlist/796vN4CzQmr7lc3ugl1kQ3).)
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: alcoholism, prostitution, PTSD-like flashbacks

Dick’s face was frozen in shock as he stared down Jason Todd, who he hadn’t seen in… 

Well, he honestly wasn’t even sure how long. The days all ran together. 

He and Jason hadn’t even been that close before Jason died, and coming back to life hadn’t helped their relationship much. He had been happy that Jason came back, of course, because anyone who the Joker killed deserved better and, well, Dick wasn’t an asshole - as combative as their relationship had been, he certainly hadn’t wished him dead. But even after he came back, Jason and Dick had always regarded each other with cool indifference. Jason wasn’t quite ready to forgive the less-than-stellar way that he had treated him when Bruce had taken him in. They hadn’t been friends. The only reason they interacted at all is because they were fellow Robins. Of course, it didn’t help that Jason had a habit of going rogue and using methods that he and Bruce both vehemently disapproved of. In fact, their disagreements over guns and the use of deadly force had frequently led to physical altercations. 

It was for all of those reasons why Jason Todd was the last person Dick had ever expected to see on the other side of the door. 

Jason gave him an expectant look and opened the door to invite him inside, all six feet of his solid-muscle stature imposing as ever, and Dick reluctantly stepped through the threshold. 

“What are you doing here?”, Dick repeated. 

“I’m certainly not here to fuck you, _that’s_ for damn sure.” 

He glared. “How did you find me?” 

“Do you mean, how is it that _I_ was the one to find you, and not Bats or Timberly?” He didn’t wait for Dick’s reply. A cocky smirk crossed his face. “It’s simple. I’m willing to go places and use sources that Bats and Tim aren’t.” 

Dick’s glower intensified. “What are you doing here, Jason?” 

His eyes narrowed. “I’ve been hearing rumors that there is a Dick Grayson lookalike selling his body. One of my sources confirmed that it was you.” He paused, appearing to turn the words over in his head. “I’m getting worried, man. It’s only a matter of time before B finds out, and then he is going to find you and beat you into a pulp.” 

Dick cut in with a bitter, gargled laugh. “Let ‘im.” 

“Seriously Dick, first you go off the grid for ten months and now _this_?” 

Dick snorted, throwing himself onto the arm chair next to the bed in the shitty motel room. “As if you, _of all people_ , have any right to judge me for my life choices.” 

“That’s exactly why I didn’t bring your little army of Bats with me to knock some fucking sense into you and drag you back to Gotham. Of all people, Dick, I get it. _I get it._ I understand what hitting rock bottom feels like.” 

Dick glared at him wordlessly and rolled his eyes. 

Jason’s expression waivered. “You haven’t gotten there yet, have you?” He fell silent for a nearly-uncomfortable length of time, searching Dick’s face. “You need help, Dick, but nobody can force you to get it. Forcing someone to get help never works. You have to ask for it.” He sighed, running a hand through his hair, pulling gently on the white stripe in the front as his gaze fell to the floor. “But I can see that you aren’t there quite yet. You haven’t hit rock bottom.” 

Jason’s saddened features must have moved him in some fashion, because Dick sighed and glared for a moment before pulling his burner phone out of his pocket and handing it to Jason. “Put your number in there.” 

Jason cocked his eyebrow. “Any chance I can talk you into coming back to Gotham with me?” 

Dick laughed, but some of his malice was gone. “Not a chance.” 

Jason gave him a measured look. “Fine. Call me if you need me.” 

“I will,” Dick said dismissively. 

Jason took two large strides across the room then took him by the shoulders, and Dick was surprised by the intensity in his eyes. “Promise me, Dick. Promise me that, when the time comes that you hit rock bottom, you will call.” 

After a pensive silence, he replied, “When my time comes, I will.” 

His time came only three days later. 

  
Wally hates that Dick is selling his body for money. 

Wally hates that Dick allows himself to be manhandled by these _worthless_ people. 

It fills Wally with fury. The Dick Grayson that Wally knows would never allow himself to be treated like this. He would never let some drug lord choke him, hit him, fuck him. The Dick Grayson that Wally knows would fight back. 

The Dick Grayson that Wally knows would not be in this situation in the first place. 

But as Wally watches on, Dick is thrown against the back of a tattered couch, his pants are yanked down just far enough to expose his ass and the other man begins to pound into him mercilessly. 

Usually Wally doesn’t watch these interactions too closely – he feels as if he is invading Dick’s privacy, and it gives him an uncomfortable twinge of _something_ that he can’t quite put his finger on – but this time, he walks right up to Dick and looks in his eyes. They were once so bright, so blue, so full of mischief and love. But now, they are listless. Empty. Faded. 

Wally’s heart breaks as he sees just how sad his eyes are. The last time he saw that look on his face… it was when Wally had broken the news to him that he was leaving the team and moving to Palo Alto. He closes his eyes against the onslaught of realization, but it comes nonetheless. 

_It’s me. I’m the reason he’s doing this. I’m the reason he’s self-destructing. It’s all because of **me**._

As Wally looks back to his best friend’s face in sheer terror, Dick’s haunted eyes stare right through him. 

  
Bent over a ratty couch at yet another cheap motel, he grunted as his “date” throttled into him, thrusting in an uneven, jerky rhythm, as the other man moaned out “ _Ronald_.” 

Dick rolled his eyes as he was jostled about. This man had no class. Not that he had room to talk, because he was the one bent over the ratty couch at a cheap motel, but still. He had _clearly_ introduced himself as “Richard”. The man had already called him a whole slew of different names – Rupert, Raymond, Roger, and Ronald so far as he erratically thrusted into Dick, sweaty and breathing heavily, groaning and gasping as he moved. 

He let out a theatrical groan himself, pretending to be enjoying it, and went to moan the man’s name for good measure when he realized that he didn’t actually know the man’s name, either. 

Oh well. Dick didn’t need his name to do his job. As long as had a pliant asshole, that’s all it took to get paid. He surrendered himself to staring listlessly at the wall, waiting for the man to finish, pretending he was anywhere other than bent over that nasty couch in that cramped motel room. Eventually the man’s breathing grew heavier and thrusts became more unpredictable until he came inside him with the cry of, _“Rob!”_

Dick froze. 

His muscles tensed, stomach clenching painfully. 

Rob. 

_Wrong name. Wrong time._

He felt his heartbeat accelerate and his breathing became ragged. 

_Wrong name, wrong name…_

That nickname. That sacred nickname. 

_Wrong name, that’s the WRONG NAME, YOU DON’T GET TO CALL ME THAT!_

Fury radiated through him and he clutched his head, bent over against the couch. In the back of his mind, he passively registered hearing someone scream. He realized only a moment later that it was him. His cheeks were raw and stinging from the tears streaming down his face and his throat strained as he sobbed. 

His entire friendship with Wally flashed before his eyes. The patrols. The video games. The team. The missions. The heartbreak he had felt when Wally left the team. The thrill and hope that he felt when he first saw Wally donning his Kid Flash uniform again. The brokenness he had felt when he died. The certainty that he now felt that Wally’s heart would be completely shattered if he saw him like this. And in that moment, Dick shattered. 

There was nothing left for him to figure out. 

All of his sadness, all of his denial… it was worthless. There was no amount of internal struggle that could bring him back. Wally was gone. 

He was shoved off the back of the couch by a hand that he could no longer see, and his back hit the floor with a dull thud. 

_Where did he go?_

He slumped over, his screams dulling to a pathetic, mournful wail. 

_Where did you go, Wally?_

He felt a burning pain in his shoulder-joints as someone grabbed him by the wrists and yanked him upwards. 

_Why did you leave?_

It vaguely registered in his mind that someone was yelling at him. 

_Why did you leave me?_

He couldn’t tell what they were saying, but it made his head hurt. 

_You should be here, Wally._

Something about making too much noise. 

_Don’t you know I need you?_

Rough hands seized him by his waist and hoisted him into the air. 

_Why did you leave?_

He opened his eyes flutteringly to see the man’s large, rough hand opening the front door. 

_Why did you leave me here all alone?_

The man was shouting that Dick was going to get him kicked out of his room because of his wailing. 

_Don’t you know I need you?_

Suddenly, Dick was in the air. 

_I can’t do this without you._

The man was shouting some more. 

_You’re my best friend._

Dick hit the sidewalk, hard, his head bouncing off the concrete. 

_You’re the love of my life._

He felt his clothes flutter on top of him, tossed out the door by the other man. 

_I never got the chance to tell you._

His vision blurred. 

_I need to tell you._

He felt so, so tired. 

_I love you._

His eyelids fluttered shut. 

_Please come back._

He blacked out. 

  
Wally sees the man seize up and cry out, “Rob!” 

Wally sees Dick freeze, pain filling his eyes. He watches, as if in slow motion, as Dick curls up into himself and his face contorts until he lets out a sob. 

And then suddenly, Dick’s sob turns to a scream and the other man in the room pushes him off the couch in surprise. Dick crumples to the floor, still wailing, and the man looks horrified and then angry. He begins to shout, _“Shut the fuck up! You’re going to get me kicked out!”_ , and seizes Dick by his wrists, dragging him towards the door. 

Wally’s instincts kick in and he rushes forward to attack the man. A thousand battle strategies blossom in his brain – kick to the back of the knee, punch to the side of the head; slide-tackle and knee his face; cut in front and elbow in his nose – but some invisible force holds him back. He presses against the unseen barrier, pounding his fist against it, but it’s like pushing up against a mattress; some give to it, but it ultimately sends his fist bouncing backwards to exactly where he started. He follows the man down the hall, through the lobby and out the front door. 

He begins to shout, “Stop it! Stop it! Stop hurting him!” as he watches the other man pick Dick up by the waist and roughly pull his pants up. But Wally’s voice echoes and warbles strangely amongst the orange swirl around him. Nobody hears him. 

As Dick is tossed to the curb and his head bounces on the concrete, he sinks down to his knees, crying out helplessly for his best friend. 

Wally watches him fade from consciousness with tears streaming down his face. 

  
Dick came back to consciousness in short bursts. He heard a car skid and then honk before everything went black again. Then, he heard pedestrians commenting on his bloodied face and mostly-naked appearance before slipping back into unconsciousness. He slid his eyes open slightly to see the fluorescent lights of the nearby street lamp before he went out again. He finally regained his grasp on consciousness when he woke to feel an uncomfortable sensation in his midsection. He rolled over with a grunt to find his cell phone sticking out of his coat pocket and into his ribs. 

Operating on instinct rather than anything else, he pulled out his phone and scrolled through until he found Jason’s name. He gasped in relief as he heard his gruff, familiar voice greet him with a stiff, “Red Hood.” 

Tears began to run down his already-stinging cheeks. His tongue felt thick in his mouth and he struggled to open his jaw, but he managed to hoarsely whisper, “Jay?” 

There was a pause on the other end of the line before he answered in an uncharacteristically soft voice. “Dickie-bird?” 

Sobs began to wrack his body, and he shook from head to toe, struggling to keep his voice even enough to remain intelligible to Jason. In spite of his struggle, it still came out as a whimper. “J-Jay, p-please. Please. _I need you._ Come get me.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's song: Sober II (Melodrama) by Lorde. (Playlist can be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/kajnsn/playlist/796vN4CzQmr7lc3ugl1kQ3).)
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: mentions of minor injuries, brief mentions of medical tests, brief sexual content

  
“Dick? Are you okay?” 

Dick just groans into the phone in response. He hears Jason begin to talk and then he wafts out of consciousness until he can no longer hear anything, and then all at once, Jason’s voice becomes louder and he hears the worry behind his shouted words. Dick thinks he hears a car door slam from Jason’s end of the line, but he isn’t sure, and then Jason speaks the first sentence that Dick actually understands: “Dick – are you safe right now?” 

He pulls his body upright to examine his surroundings, mouth still moving slower than his thoughts. “Dunno, Jay.” 

“Where are you?” 

Dick shakes his head as if to clear the fuzziness from his thoughts, but it only makes his headache worse. He slurrs, “Dunno. Feel like I havva concussion.” 

He definitely hears the sound of a car starting from Jason’s end of the line. “Okay. Just stay awake. Stay with me, Dickie-bird. Can you tell me where you are right now?” 

He lookes up again, eyes bleary. “Motel.” 

“Are you outside or inside?” 

“Ou’side.” 

“Where outside?” Dick is silent for a full minute, flitting in and out of consciousness, and Jason speaks again, voice demanding and insistent. “C’mon, big bro, you can do this. Where are you outside of the motel?” 

He groans. He just wants to fall asleep. “Fron’ door.” 

“You’re sitting by the front door?” Dick grunts in confirmation. “Okay. Are you safe there?” Dick grunts again. “Stay there. Stay right where you are, Dick; I’m coming to get you.” 

Twenty minutes later, Jason pulls up in a dark SUV. Dick doesn’t bother questioning how he knew where to find him. 

As Jason helps him into the back of the car, shouldering most of his shaking weight, he asks a series of rapidfire questions that don’t register as words to Dick. “Are you okay? When’s the last time you ate? How long have you been awake? How much have you had to drink today?” Jason is dressing him now, pulling his jeans the rest of the way over his hips and slipping his jacket over his shoulders. He continues firing off a series of questions, asked one right after the other, until Jason lands on a question that he repeats until Dick understands – “Have you been using protection?” 

Dick blinks at him through the tears and gives the most honest answer he can muster – “I don’t remember.” 

“Jesus, Dick.” Even in his inebriated and concussed state, Dick can tell Jason is holding back anger in his voice. “Okay. Let’s go. We’re gonna get you tested.” 

Dick just grunts again and allows Jason to buckle him into the back seat. 

Within ten minutes, they pull up to a small brick building and Jason puts an arm around his shoulders to usher him inside. 

Dick blinks blearily once they walk through the door. “Where are we?” 

Jason just shushes him and guides him through the doors with a firm grip before depositing him on one of the sterile waiting room seats. He strides up to the receptionist’s desk and murmurs a few words to her, to which she nods and hands Jason a clip board. Jason returns to Dick’s side and begins asking him a series of questions – very invasive questions, if you asked Dick – about his sex partners and whether or not he has used drugs, all the while jotting notes on the clip board. He answers as honestly as he can manage in his cried-out and intoxicated state. 

After Jason returns the clip board to the receptionist, Dick sighs and asks again, “Where are we?” 

“Planned Parenthood. We’re getting you tested.” 

Dick scoffs. “For what?” 

Jason takes a moment to glare at Dick. “STD’s. AIDS. There’s a doctor on staff to check for a concussion. And afterwards, we’ll deal with your mental health. We’re getting you cleaned up. Then, I’m taking you back home to the manor. If I had known it was this bad, I would have done this three days ago when I first tracked down your sorry ass.” 

Dick returns his scowl, though it is several degrees weaker than Jason’s. The other man just rolls his eyes in response as he saunters to the vending machine in the corner, deposits some change, and returns with a bottle of water. “Drink.” 

Dick accepts it without a fuss. The cool liquid feels good on his ravaged throat – one of his clients had insisted on fucking his mouth earlier that day, and he hadn’t exactly been gentle. After a few minutes of wordlessly sipping and listening to the serene music playing from the small speakers in the ceiling, a nurse emerges from the door behind the receptionist’s desk and offers Jason and Dick a kind smile. “Good evening. Mr. Grayson?” 

She leads Jason and Dick through the hallway and into an exam room, and before Dick knows it, he is answering questions and being probed and tested. The staff are nice enough, and if they are judging him for being a callboy, they do an impeccable job hiding it. They mostly appear concerned with making sure he is healthy. Forty-five minutes, a series of tests and several dozen awkward questions later, the two men emerge from the small clinic and Jason ushers Dick back to his SUV. 

As they drive down the road, Dick breaks through the quiet with a question. “Why are you doing this?” 

Jason doesn’t take his eyes off the road. “Whenever I come across a sex worker or an addict who wants to turn their life around, this is what I do. Planned Parenthood, mental health screening, then off to a shelter – in another city where all of her negative influences are out of reach.” He hazards a glance towards Dick. “Your shelter will be the manor. You need your family around you right now.” 

Dick sits in sullen silence for a moment, then asks the question that has been burning in the back of his mind since regaining consciousness. “Do they know?” 

Jason gives one curt nod of his head. “They know I found you. They know you’re in a real bad state. But that’s all. Far as I’m concerned, the rest of it ain’t my story to tell.” 

Dick purses his lips but has nothing to say to that, so he lets the car slip back into companionable stillness. 

Jason's SUV comes to a stop in an abandoned parking lot. He turns off the ignition and throws the keys in the glove compartment then walks Dick to an old phone booth at the far corner of the lot, opening the rickety door to reveal a Zeta Tube inside. 

“Let’s go.” 

Dick stares incredulously. He can feel himself sobering up, and it’s making him cranky. "How the fuck do you have Zeta Beam clearance?" 

Jason doesn't look up as he messes with the control pad. "I've been working with the Justice League for the past four months." 

" _What_?" 

Jason cocks an eyebrow and turns to him. He fixes him with a hard stare for a moment before opening his mouth. "When you bolted from Gotham, you stole my hard-earned title of 'family fuck-up'. I had no choice but to go lightside." 

Dick is speechless for a moment, until he sees the small smirk lift the side of Jason's lips, and they both burst into laughter. 

Jason presses a few buttons inside the booth, still chuckling, and a beam of light appears around them to take them to their next destination. Dick knows where they are the second he smells the air - they're in Gotham. When they step out of the booth and into the din of the city, he recognizes the area - 48th street by the docks. 

There isn't much around aside from old warehouses, but he has raided them enough times on patrol to know the general layout of the area. They walk for a few blocks and come to a stop in front of an undersized, worn concrete building. Dick looks to Jason for an explanation. 

"Psychiatrist. A personal friend of mine. She helped me a lot when I went through the whole... coming-back-from-the-dead, thing. As soon as you called me, I called her, and she cleared her schedule to see you." Dick nods, too tired to resist, and allows Jason to escort him inside. 

Inside stands a small waiting room, and Dick and Jason take a seat. They sit in silence for a few minutes until the psychiatrist – Dr. Hudson – greets them with a kind smile. “You must be Dick,” she says warmly. She waves Dick back and he follows her through the door into her office. It’s small – big enough for a desk, a couch, and one cramped bookshelf. She takes a seat at her desk and Dick eases into the squishy loveseat. 

She’s nice; she has graying hair but has an aura of eternal youth about her. She is full of equal parts energy and grace, and she looks at Dick as if she can see right through him, so he doesn't bother hiding anything from her. What's the point? If Jason trusts her, that’s good enough for him. 

He doesn't talk about Wally. But she looks like she actually kind of cares, so he talks about other things. He talks about his drinking habits and his sexual history. He tells her about how he can't even get out of bed anymore without a drink and how he hasn't gotten so much as a half-erection in several months. He tells her how many men he has slept with since he came to Metropolis and talks about the time he tried cocaine. He tells her about how his anus sometimes burns from overstimulation after a six-client day. But at least, he tells her, he's feeling _something_ now. And isn't that healthier? To feel something, rather than nothing? 

A sad smile graces her features - and he starts to get the feeling that she understands. There isn't a hint of judgement in her voice when she says, "Richard, you have done the best you could with what you had. Drinking until you throw up every night isn't healthy. Neither is sleeping with over forty men in a ten month period. But you know what? Everything you did served a purpose for you at the time. You did the best you could in a really terrible situation." 

She doesn't ask what the 'terrible situation' is. She doesn't even know what the situation _is_ , and somehow, she seems to understand. For the second time that day, he breaks down into tears. 

"You did your best, Richard. You did your best." 

She repeats the mantra until he starts to believe it. 

"It's all a part of the healing process. You did the absolute best you could. But now, you have a better way of handling your grief. Now that you know a better way, you can do better for yourself." 

She writes him a prescription for antidepressants and anxiety medication, as well as something to help him sleep, and gives him detailed instructions on when to take it and when to come back to check in with her about his dosage. He sighs in the comfy chair, feeling lighter than he had felt in months, and absorbs all of the information. Then, Dr. Hudson walks him back to the lobby, prescription in hand, and gives him back to Jason. Jason calls a taxi and they get in, riding to the manor in silence. 

Dick sees the reflection of his face in the car window and recoils. He looks absolutely _awful_. There are dark circles under his eyes. His face, once angular and handsome, appears sunken in and haunted. There is a gash on his forehead, which has been cleaned up and lightly bandaged by the Planned Parenthood staff. He has bruises on his neck – hickeys from one client, a faded handprint around his neck from another. 

His train of thought is interrupted as the taxi pulls up in front of the manor. Now comes the part that Dick has been dreading the most: reuniting with his family. 

His heart pounds as he steps out of the taxi and looks up at the manor for the first time in many months. It looks even bigger than he remembers it, he thinks, as Jason pays the taxi driver and steers Dick towards the front door. Maybe it’s because he knows his family is inside. He’s not sure how he will be received. Will they even want to see him? 

He would understand if they didn’t. He figures he doesn’t really deserve much sympathy. He thinks Alfred would at least be happy to see him, because the man is an angel and Bruce has honestly put him through much worse, but he honestly can’t even remember the last interaction he’d had with either Bruce or Tim. It feels like a lifetime ago, and he was almost certainly drunk at the time. He can only assume the last time he spoke with them had been on more negative side of things. 

_Holy shit, I haven’t seen them in months. They haven’t seen **me** in months. I didn’t even tell them I was leaving. I just disappeared._

Seeing the manor, walking through the large brass gate, making their way up the sidewalk… it throws into sharp relief the betrayal that his family must have felt. The betrayal they must still be feeling. He’d left them, without a word of explanation why. He ponders how he would feel if he was in their place and it had been Tim or Jason that had left instead. 

He’d be… Well, he’d be pissed. Scared. Furious. Terrified. He’d feel insulted that his brother didn’t want him around; indignant that he didn’t think him capable of helping him through it. Right or wrong, he knows that’s how he would feel if the situation was reversed. 

He doesn’t have much time to dwell on the thought though, because Jason pushes him inside the front door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (AUTHOR'S NOTE - the shift in verb tense was intentional. The story will be in present tense from now on. See if you can correctly guess why!)


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's song: Prodigal by Casting Crowns (Playlist can be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/kajnsn/playlist/796vN4CzQmr7lc3ugl1kQ3).)
> 
> _**Please note - the song for this chapter is by a Christian band. I am neither promoting nor discouraging any religion. I, personally, am not religious - I just chose this song because it fits the feel of the chapter, and the lyrics are absolutely devastating._
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: brief language
> 
>  
> 
> **I want to take a moment to apologize to all of you for taking so long to update this story. If you have been following my Twitter, you know I've been incredibly sick for the past couple of weeks. Pretty much all I've been doing was sleeping and working, and my writing took a back-burner. Regular updates should continue from now on!**

Upon walking into the manor, Dick is immediately hit with the smell of home, familiar and safe. Tension starts to leave his body in spite of his nervousness at seeing the rest of his family again. He inhales deeply. The musty smell of old books, a faint trace of lemon-scented cleaning products, and the sweet aroma of Alfred’s cookies. 

Looking around, he observes entryway. It was practically burned into his memory. If someone had created an exact replica of the manor and stuck him inside it he would still know he wasn’t in the real one, because he had memorized all of the little signs that the manor had been lived in. 

A small smear of green paint from when Dick was ten and had to make an art project in school. Back then, Dick had been so sure that he was going to get in trouble, but Bruce had just laughed and smeared a second blob of paint right next to it to show him that he didn’t care. He had left it there, all of these years. Dick finds himself hoping that Bruce treasures the memory just as much as he does. 

A small dent in the wall by the door frame from when he and Tim had made the mistake of playing flag football inside the manor on a rainy day. Alfred had almost kicked them both out of the house that day. Now they can look back on it and laugh, but at the time it had been terrifying. 

And if Dick walks around the corner, he knows he would see a stain on the floor from when he hid by the front door and jumped out at Tim, scaring him so badly that he dropped his entire mug of coffee on the cream-colored carpet. 

He would also see the patch of white on the wall that smells like mint and is just _slightly_ brighter than the paint around it because Dick had put a hole in the wall when he was practicing flinging birdarangs – he had tried to develop a more aerodynamic and easy-to-control model, which had obviously failed – and Tim had the brilliant idea to fill it in with white toothpaste so Bruce wouldn’t notice. 

And in Dick’s room. When Dick was younger, he had pulled up a loose piece of the wooden crown molding along the floor behind his bed and had carved a small cubby-hole to hide his porn magazines. When he slid the crown molding back down against the floor, it was nearly impossible to tell that anything had been modified. In the back of his mind he wonders if Bruce had found it during his absence. He tries to remember what he had last left in there, but he can’t recall. 

All of those memories, all of those little imperfections. Homesickness is something he hadn’t felt until that moment. He feels his resolve, already weak from exhaustion and sobriety, beginning to crack. 

And then, a very flustered Alfred rushes around the corner and comes to an abrupt stop in front of the two of them. 

“Master Dick,” he breathes out. Apologies immediately begin to spill from Dick’s mouth. Out of everyone in the manor, Alfred’s the one who deserves the worry and pain he’s caused them the very _least_. 

Alfred just waves off his apologies. “I had been hoping it was you,” he says shakily, his British propriety slipping as he pulls Dick into a tight hug. “I’m simply glad you are here, Master Dick.” He leans back to get a good look at him with a calculating expression. “We were worried.” 

“I know,” Dick responds quietly, eyes downcast. 

“Just don’t do it again, sir. That’s all I ask.” Dick nods obediently, ashamed. 

Jason clears his throat to get the butler’s attention. “Where are Bruce and Tim?” 

Alfred looks over to the other man and seems to take a second to straighten himself out. “Already waiting downstairs, Master Jason.” Jason gives him an appreciative nod, clapping a hand to his shoulder, and steers Dick towards the bat-cave door. 

Jason strides down the stairs and into the cave with an ease that Dick hadn’t seen from him in a long time - not since he was Robin. But now, he walks around with a familiarity and ease that makes Dick’s heart ache. Seeing him so calm and so _relaxed_ in the manor is jarring, but not at all unwelcome; it just throws into sharp relief how much he has missed over the past ten months. Things are different now than they were before. Dick can’t help but wonder what else has changed in his absence. 

As they reach the bottom of the stairs and Dick sees Bruce and Tim for the first time since his return, Dick expects to see anger on their faces. He expects them to shout. He almost expects them to attack – to pick up his frail body and slam him against a wall. But they don’t. 

Tim is balanced on the balls of his feet, leaning forward as if to run to Dick to hug him. Or hit him. Dick hasn’t figured out which one. Tim looks like he hasn’t either. 

Bruce’s expression is different though. He remains as stoic and steady as ever. The cowl of his suit is pulled down to reveal his face, but his cowl may as well be on – he is a brick wall, completely unreadable. When Bruce’s blue eyes flick down Dick’s body to take in the open vest and loose-fitting, dirty jeans he is wearing, he sees a flash of judgement in his eyes and feels another wave of shame wash over him. 

But as ashamed as Dick feels, he cannot bring himself to apologize. There is a wedge there, invisible and imposing, and it comes from being a Robin. Robins are always under scrutiny. There’s always been tension between Robin and Batman – Batman pushes and Robin must push back, or else be bowled over. Admitting weakness to Bruce is the same as admitting defeat. It simply isn’t done in their household. 

Jason breaks the silence. “Who’s on patrol?” 

Dick is surprised at the aura of confidence, even authority, which Jason now seems to exude around the two of them. He finds himself more impressed than ever with his successor, and on the opposite side of the coin, more embarrassed with himself. Jason had truly stepped up in his absence. 

Bruce is unmoving, seemingly hesitant to answer the question, before he finally speaks. “Robin,” he responds stiffly. 

Jason’s eyes narrow. “Can we trust him on his own?” 

Dick cuts them off, his voice taking an irritated tilt. “Tim’s right in front of you guys. He’s obviously not patrolling.” His head is starting to hurt, and he really just wants to get this over with so he can go to bed. Dick’s eyes sweep around at his family as he receives silence in response to his statement, and it’s at that point that he notices Tim’s new uniform as well as the sour look on his face. Interesting. 

Dick looks to Jason, who gives him a meaningful look in return. “Things have changed while you’ve been gone, Dick.” 

He frowns in response; going from drunk to hungover while still awake is a real bitch, and irritation spikes within him at the realization that he’s much slower at playing detective than he used to be. He looks between Jason and the pair of caped men, expression going from confused to incredulous as he puts it together. “ _Another_ Robin? Bruce, you didn’t adopt another kid, did you?” Bruce’s telling silence triggers irritation. “Seriously? Oh, Bruce, you have a _problem_. Are you trying to build a child army or something? I mean, _fuck_ -” 

Jason cuts him off. “Dick. It’s not what you think.” 

Dick can still irritation building but falls silent for the time being. Out of all of the people in the room at the moment, he trusts Jason the most. If Jason says it’s fine, then he will drop it. For now. 

After a beat, Tim speaks up. “Where have you _been_?” His voice is so broken that it almost gets through Dick’s defensive, hungover mask. 

Almost. “Metropolis,” he answers stiffly. 

Tim opens his mouth to speak, a desperate look in his eyes, but Bruce cuts him off. “Jason. Tim. I want a moment alone.” 

Probably the most reassuring thing about the whole experience is that the two men immediately glare at Bruce. There has always been a camaraderie between the three of them, family issues aside. The eternal tug-of-war between Batman and Robin usually left the Robins on the same side of the struggle, at least when dealing with Bruce, making them allies by default if not friends. 

“Dick?” Tim asks gently. 

Dick gives them a terse nod. “Go ahead, guys. I’ll be okay.” 

“Fine. We’ll be right upstairs,” Jason answers gruffly, and he and Tim turn to leave. Dick listens to their footsteps growing softer until they disappear altogether, and the manor door closes. He then looks back to Bruce, waiting for the explosion that he’s sure is coming. 

It never comes. Instead Bruce just sighs and leans back against the bat-computer desk, eyes searching Dick’s expression. Dick cocks an eyebrow and purses his lips into a scowl, folding his arms, feeling like a petulant teenager all over again under Bruce’s scrutinizing gaze. He shrugs. “Well?” 

Bruce’s eyes drift all over Dick’s body and Dick is sure he is noticing the bags under his eyes, how loosely his clothes fit, and the hickeys on his neck. Bruce opens and closes his mouth several times as if trying to decide what to say, then finally settles on, “Dick, _are you okay_?” 

That, he hadn’t expected. It has been _such_ a long day, and his mask is crumbling. He is still feeling very raw after the therapy session. Dick’s bottom lip quivers and his voice shakes as he finally manages, “…No. I’m not. I’m hurting.” 

Bruce opens his mouth to respond, but Dick cuts him off. “I’m hurting, Bruce. I lost my best friend. I pushed my team away, and then my family, because it felt like nobody understood. And you know what? Nobody does. And it’s because I don’t want to talk about it, because _what is even the point_?” 

“Dick—” 

He wants to stop talking but the floodgates have opened, so he just lets the words fall out. “Nobody understands because I don’t want them to, because it hurts _so fucking bad_ , Bruce, for reasons I will never be ready to admit out loud. And you know what? I’m tired. All of this? It’s too much.” He holds up a hand and begins to tick off each finger. “My best friend died. I left my team. I moved to a Metropolis. I didn’t even know how long I’ve been gone because I’ve been drunk the whole time. And I’ve been selling my body for money.” His shoulders are hunched over, arms wrapped around himself defensively as he glowers at Bruce. “So no, Bruce, _I’m not okay._ ” 

Dick knows he deserves a lecture for because most to all of what he had just listed was his own fault, but Bruce just stares instead. His eyes look… sad. Heavy. The same look he had on his face after Jason died. 

“Dick,” he says softly. “Dick.” 

And then Dick can’t make eye contact anymore. He stares at the floor. “What?” 

“I thought I had lost you.” 

Dick looks up at him just in time to see him falling forward to pull him into a tight hug. 

“I thought I’d lost you, Dick, and it’s all I could think about.” 

Bruce was shaking slightly. Dick answers him hesitantly. “You haven’t. You… you won’t. I’m smarter than that.” 

Bruce pulls back and holds him at arm’s length, his eyes rimmed red with unshed tears. He gives him a _look_. 

Dick chuckles in spite of himself. “Okay, I’m not _that_ smart; obviously I’ve made some poor decisions lately. But I’m not going to go dying on you.” 

His expression takes on that heavy quality again, and his voice is shaky. “Dying isn’t the only way to lose someone, Dick.” 

His limbs begin to shake. Bruce smells so familiar – Kevlar and sweat and Gotham’s air and a trace of his expensive cologne. He collapses into the older man’s arms. Bruce just holds him tight as he sobs. “It hurts so bad, Bruce. I’m not strong enough for this…” He is whimpering and hiccuping and words are spilling out of his mouth. “I can’t do this. I can’t do this, Bruce. I can’t do this on my own, I can’t, _I can’t…_ ” 

“You don’t have to,” Bruce responds, his voice a low rumble in his chest. “You’re home now. I’m here, son. I’m going to help you. Everything is going to be okay.” 

He holds Dick until he cries himself out and falls asleep in his arms.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's song: My Immortal by Evanescence (Playlist can be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/kajnsn/playlist/796vN4CzQmr7lc3ugl1kQ3).)
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: mention of blood/death, mention of canonical character death, depression

  
Several hours later, Dick wakes up to a blistering headache. He reaches over to grab the bottle he usually keeps on the bedside table only to smack his hand against a window. 

_…What?_

Blearily opening his eyes and ignoring the way his head throbs, he glances around in confusion and realizes he isn’t in his apartment. He isn’t even in Metropolis. 

He’s at the manor. 

As the events of day before rush back to him, he is filled with simultaneous relief and dread. For a moment, he had thought that it was all just a particularly realistic dream. But it had really happened. He had really left Metropolis. 

He’d left it all behind. 

He’s back with his family. 

He isn’t sure how to feel about that yet. 

His eyes squint against the morning light and he groans. He hears movement at the other end of the room and attempts to sit up, but ends up pulling the covers over his head instead. 

“Wakey-wakey, eggs and bakey!” comes Jason’s all-too-cheerful voice. 

Dick can smell breakfast – no doubt Alfred’s doing – but his stomach turns over at the thought of eating. He lets out a groan that turns into a childish whine as Jason pulls the covers off his face. 

“It’s time for day one of your sobriety, big bro, and you’re going to spend it with _me_.” He tosses the blanket to the opposite corner of the room. “Eat up. You’ll need your strength.” 

Dick just groans again and rolls over. 

  
When sobering up, there are many things that one starts to notice about the stupid fucking world. 

For one, the air. Had the air always hurt his lungs like this? It feels like inhaling acid. Breathing didn’t used to suck this badly. 

Two. The lights are too loud. He could swear that the fluorescent lights are buzzing just to spite him. Is Bruce aware that his lights are currently screaming at the top of their nonexistent lungs? Oh, who’s he kidding; Bruce wouldn’t notice a change in the manor short of the damn thing burning to the ground. He’d have to ask Alfred if he wanted any real answers. 

Three. People like to talk too much. He wishes they would all just shut the fuck _up_. 

  
Dick isn’t sure how he’s supposed to feel when experiencing withdrawal symptoms, but he had never imagined it would be quite like this. He feels hazy, like he’s floating, but he also feels like his body has tripled in weight. 

He thought he would have worse cravings. Of course the craving for alcohol is there, but he’s also so tired that it’s just not worth fighting Jason over, so he resigns himself to sobriety. He has a headache and wants to spend the day in bed, but Jason is apparently having exactly none of that, so Dick obediently gets out of bed and follows him around the manor, pointedly ignoring the pain radiating through his body. 

He _will_ do this. He needs to get sober and… well, he isn’t sure yet. Do something positive. He a contributing member of society. Or something. 

Jason guides him through the manor and towards the back door, into the gardens. As they step out onto the terrace and into the sun, Jason is unflinchingly cheerful to the point of sarcasm. When Dick complains about his cheeriness, Jason says it’s Dick’s punishment for ever thinking that he could just get up and leave their family. He seems to take it personally, Dick notes with an inward smile. 

“You can’t just leave our family, Dick. That’s _my_ job,” Jason says, “and I already failed at it. Twice. And believe me, I fucking tried. I literally _died_ once and I still ended up coming back here, so,” he rounds on him with his finger pointed at his nose, “Richard Dickface Grayson, you’re stuck with us. Deal with it.” 

Dick can’t help but laugh in spite of how badly his entire being hurts. “Do you even know what my middle name is?” 

“I don’t care what it says on your birth certificate. Your middle name is now Dickface.” 

Dick chuckles in spite of himself. 

Jason’s eyebrows simply raise up. “Just you wait. I’ll have Timmy hack the government database and legally chance your middle name to ‘Dickface’. _Then_ we’ll see who has the last laugh.” 

  
Dick has been drinking water all day so his headache has lessened somewhat, but he’s still feeling weak – he’s only been able to pick at whatever food Jason and Alfred have tried to shove in front of him. He’s feeling wrung out, both mentally and physically. His gut twists in pain – he can feel some very uncomfortable trips to the bathroom in his future – and his muscles burn as if he had done a particularly vigorous workout the night before. 

Later on that evening, Dick joins Tim, Jason, and Bruce in the Batcave. Bruce sits at the computer with Tim and Jason on either side of him. Dick feels awkward standing behind Bruce’s computer chair in silence, so he attempts to strike up a conversation. 

“So, what’s this I hear about a new Robin?” 

“We sent him off to a friend’s house for a few days so you could get reacclimated,” Bruce answers shortly. 

“Without being cut to ribbons,” Jason mutters under his breath. 

Tim looks to Jason, uncertainty on his face. “Are you his friend can handle the devil-spawn? The little pipsqueak seems too sweet for this world, not to mention for Damian.” 

“If shit hits the fan, his dad can step in. He’ll be fine.” Jason’s face splits into a knowing grin. “Besides, I think our little Dami has a soft spot for the pipsqueak. He’s not gonna hurt him.” 

Bruce cuts off their conversation. “Enough. Tim, you’re serving as Oracle tonight. You and Dick will stay here while Jason and I patrol. We have a drug bust tonight. No weapons.” 

Bruce gives Jason a pointed look, and the look he gets in return is far too innocent. Bruce cocks an eyebrow and Jason sighs in resignation, pulling a gun out of his boot and another out of his chest plate, then tosses them down onto the bat-computer desk. 

Dick watches this exchange with delight. If he sees an amused gleam in the eyes of both Bruce and Jason, he knows better than to comment. The easy exchange lifts some of the weight from his heart. 

At least _something_ over the past few months had gone right. 

  
Soon Jason and Bruce speed out of the Batcave and onto the streets of Gotham, leaving Tim and Dick behind. 

Tim is quiet throughout the evening. Dick can sense from Tim the resentment and the burning desire to ask questions, but Tim has the most self-restraint out of the four of them so Dick isn’t surprised when Tim doesn’t comment. Bruce must have instructed him not to badger him; Dick can’t think of any other reason Tim isn’t asking. He’s the family detective, after all. Asking questions is what he’s best at. 

He gets to see Tim’s detective skills up close while he handles the case over their comm system. Tim researches and catalogues information with impressive efficiency. He has a finesse about him while he works. He can see why Bruce chose him to be their eyes and ears during their patrol. 

In spite of his apparent irritation with him, Tim does a commendable job at attempting to involve Dick. Every once in a while he will ask Dick a question or make a comment. “Do you remember the name of the diner on 4th street?”, or “Hey, check out this security cam footage. I need a second set of eyes on this to see if there’s anything I missed.” 

Dick does his best to help, but his brain is slow and sluggish and it just ends up irritating him that he can’t do better. Tim eventually gives up trying to involve him, and they end up just chatting amicably about Gotham’s latest; Tim fills him in on the newest gang activity and movement of the criminals that seem to frequent their city. As the hours dwindle early into the morning, they fall into companionable silence and just listen to the interplay between Jason and Bruce over the comm system. 

Jason seems to have an easygoing quality that he hadn’t had since he had died. He knows his place in the world, Dick thinks, which he had always lacked before. Plucked from the streets by a vigilante and ending up a replacement for the ever-famous Robin - something that he was never really ready for. He hadn’t addressed his own issues at that point, between his rough upbringing and his mother’s mistreatment of him, and he was expected to take on all of Gotham’s issues too? It was only a matter of time before something disastrous happened. 

But he’s back now, and he seems even happier than he was before he died. Over the comm system, Dick listens to Bruce and Jason discuss the case. Jason sounds steadily confident and incredibly competent. But he also cracks jokes. Tim laughs with an aura of familiarity each time Jason makes a pun. It’s nice to see them all getting along and collaborating. It’s something he never thought he’d see. Silently, he sits and listens in wonder until he hears the telltale growl of the Batmobile returning to the cave. 

  
After bidding Tim goodnight, Dick makes his way up to his room. He stacks the used dishes he had scattered around the room and sets them on his desk, then gathers up his dirty clothes and drops them down the laundry chute. He pauses to survey his room. 

Not much had changed in the past year. Alfred had kept everything pretty much the same. A stack of comics on his desk, his collection of Superman action figures neatly organized on a shelf. But it all feels different. It feels as if he was transported backwards in time to… before… 

His heart constricts painfully. Before _Antarctica_. Back when his best friend was alive. 

He is mercifully snapped from his memories by a knock on his door. 

Jason’s voice greets him. “Can I come in?” 

“Yeah. Come in.” 

Jason pushes the door open and nudges his way inside. His hair is matted with sweat and his wrist is wrapped in medical tape. When he notices Dick’s gaze lingering on his wrist, he lifts it and sighs, “Sprained.” 

“That sucks.” 

“Happens.” He lifts the water bottle held in his good hand and takes a sip. “How was playing Oracle with Timberly?” 

Dick chuckles at the nickname. “It was fine. I feel pretty useless though; you guys clearly don’t need me. You work well together.” 

“It’s taken practice, but we’ve worked out most of the kinks. You should have seen us six months ago. We were all at each other’s throats.” 

“Yeah?” 

“Yeah. It was tense for a while. But we all learned to blow off steam in a little less of a full-contact-sport kinda way.” Jason smirks. “When I get angry at Bruce, sometimes I wait until he and Robin are out on patrol and steal three of the four tires from the Batmobile. He hasn’t brought it up yet, but I _know_ he knows it’s me.” 

Blue eyes dance with mischief. “What are you going to do when he finally gets sick of it and calls you out?” 

Jason offers a one-shouldered shrug. “Same thing I did the first time he caught me. Stick out my tongue and call him a big boob.” 

Dick laughs, full-bodied and loud, clutching at his stomach. Once he recovers, he shakes his head as he wipes a stray tear from his eye. “Bruce told me that story. I don’t buy it. You were like twelve; you couldn’t _possibly_ have-” 

He is interrupted by Tim opening his door. The smile instantly drains from Dick’s face at the lack of expression on Tim’s. He’s still being reserved and withdrawn around him. 

Jason doesn’t seem to notice the lack of warmth coming from Tim though, because he greets him with a radiant smile. “Hey, Timmers.” 

Tim offers him a small smile in return. “Hey, Jay. Just wanted to let you know – the tracker that you managed to get on the dealer? I tracked him back to what I believe is their safe house. Bats and I can raid it tomorrow night.” 

“Good job, man. Glad it worked.” 

“Yeah. We finally got them.” Tim casts a hesitant look towards Dick and his expression turns cold. “Are you staying the night, or do you plan to leave again?” 

Dick is momentarily speechless before he manages to stammer, “I… I’m staying, Tim.” 

Tim nods tersely and leaves the room. 

Jason turns to Dick with wide eyes. “The fuck was that?” 

Dick just sighs. “I think he’s mad at me for leaving.” 

“Want me to talk to him for you?” 

“No. Honestly, I deserve it.” He sighs. “Thanks though.” 

Jason just gives him a sympathetic grimace, gives him his medication, and leaves. 

  
Dick can’t sleep that night. He lays awake for several hours. He knows his sleeping medicine kicked in because he becomes drowsy and lethargic, but he doesn’t actually fall asleep until several hours later. The only reason he knows he actually fell asleep is because he dreams. 

He dreams that he is back in the circus, swinging on the trapeze, breeze blowing his hair behind him and feeling freer than he had felt in years. Joy courses through his body and his heartbeat drums in his ears. He flips, soaring, exhilaration surging through him as he flies through the open air underneath the colorful tapestry of the tent. His hands connect with the bar and he clamps down with his fingers, gracefully swinging over the bar once, twice, three times, then releases his grip and flips in midair to grab the bar backwards, facing the opposite direction. 

That’s when he notices a figure perched on the platform on the other side of the tent. From his vantage point, he can’t see the figure’s face – it is cast in shadow, just outside of the range of the spotlight shining on the edge of the platform. The red and yellow spandex suit the figure wears looks familiar, but he can’t quite place it. 

The person on the platform steps forward into the spotlight, raising his arms in a showman’s wave, and then the crowd that Dick previously hadn’t known was there absolutely _roars_. 

As if in slow motion, he looks from the man’s familiar uniform to his dimpled smile, green eyes, messy red hair and his heart drops as he watches those strong legs bend, and Dick’s body reacts mechanically, anticipating what comes next. The redhead dashes off the edge of the platform and dives forward, stretching out and grasping the second trapeze bar across the tent from Dick. 

Dick’s body moves without prompting, stretching forward and swinging back to compensate and match Wally’s rate of swinging on his own trapeze. He has to match his rhythm, he has to get himself close so that when Wally swings forward, Dick can catch him because he knows what’s coming, this is an act he’s seen before, he’s seen it happen a hundred times and his entire being is screaming out for Wally to _stop_ because he knows how this ends and – 

Wally’s hands release the bar and the world goes quiet and all Dick can hear is his heartbeat in his ears, eyes following the lithe body as the man soars through the air, and Dick’s muscles move automatically to prepare – his abs contract, he pulls up on the bar, he flips over himself and hooks his legs on the bar to hang upside down because Wally is soaring closer and closer and his heart is in a panic as he stretches forward because _I’m too late, I won’t make it, I’m going to miss him!_ and he can see the bright, trusting smile on the redhead’s face – 

And he cries out in relief as he feels Wally’s warm hands connect with his own, and he grips the man’s fingers and they feel so solid and _real_ \- 

And then his heart wrenches as Wally slips from his grasp and gravity kicks in to drag him towards the dirt floor. Dick watches, mouth open in a scream, as Wally falls. His body breaks as it hits the ground, the trusting, loving smile still on his lips as blood drips from the corner of his mouth. 

  
Dick wakes up. 

The first thing that he notices is the burning sensation in his throat and the ringing in his ears. It takes him a solid twenty seconds to realize that the ringing sound was a scream, and the burning sensation in his throat was because he was the one screaming. 

He snaps his jaw shut and his eyes fly open wide at the sensation of someone gripping his shoulders and shaking him. Wild eyes look upwards to see Bruce’s face, mired with fear and confusion, and he realizes he must have woken up from his nightmare with a scream. 

Breathing heavily, brow slick with sweat, Dick closes his eyes tight. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs softly. 

“Are you okay, Dick?” 

Dick nods and forces his breathing into steadiness, still not opening his eyes. “I’m fine, Bruce. Just a dream. Go back to bed.” 

Bruce hesitates and clearly does not want to oblige, but nevertheless stands up from Dick’s bed. “You’ll call if you need me?” 

It is a command more than a request and Dick knows it, so he nods. “Yeah. Just… go back to sleep. Sorry for waking you up.” Bruce nods, and after one last long look at his shaking son, backs out of the room. 

Dick rolls over and takes a gasping breath, fighting off the images of Wally’s broken body on the circus floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about this chapter. I literally cried while writing it. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> Also... who's this mysterious kid that Damian's been hanging around, eh? And who's this dad of his who can supposedly keep Damian in line? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) Those answers and more, next week!


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's song: New Divide by Linkin Park. (Playlist can be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/kajnsn/playlist/796vN4CzQmr7lc3ugl1kQ3).)
> 
> Warning for this chapter: lame attempt at humor. That's pretty much it.

  
It’s day two of being sober and his head hasn’t stopped pounding since he got back to Gotham. Dick sits in his desk chair, moping. 

Jason gives Dick a nod in solidarity as he opens Dick’s curtains and sits breakfast on his desk. It’s absolutely _pouring_ rain outside – it fits his mood, Dick thinks sourly. “You think _this_ sucks? Save your bitching for tomorrow. Third day’s the hardest.” 

Dick glares up at him from where his head rests in his hands on the table. “How would _you_ know?” 

“I had to quit, too.” Dick isn’t sure whether he means cigarettes or alcohol, but Jason doesn’t elaborate. “Third day’s the hardest. After that, it gets easier.” 

Dick sighs and pushes himself upwards in bed. “Thanks, Jason.” 

“Planned Parenthood called. Your tests came back negative. You have to go back in three months for an AIDS test, but you’re in the clear so far.” He nudges Dick’s plate of food towards him. “Eat up.” With that, he claps him on the shoulder and walks out of the room, leaving Dick to eat his bacon and eggs. 

It’s a relief, but a short-lived one, as he contemplates how to tackle his day. He considers bringing his breakfast downstairs to eat with his family - the sounds and smells of breakfast waft up from the kitchen - but regardless, he eats alone. Dealing with Bruce’s questions isn’t something he’s up for right now. 

Bruce had poked his head into Dick’s room every hour or so the night before, after his nightmare about Wally. Dick knows this because he hasn’t slept since he woke up screaming. He’d hoped that a few hours of sleep would help him feel more prepared to answer Bruce’s questions about what woke him in such dramatic fashion, but a restless night with little sleep left him feeling cold and empty. 

Once he finishes his breakfast, he heads downstairs. Solitude is an attractive concept, but at the same time, he feels restless - he doesn’t want to be holed up in his room anymore. The Batcave is the next best option. On the way down, he passes his family – Tim sits on a bar stool, typing away on his laptop on the island table by the kitchen, and Bruce and Jason sit at the dining room table with their breakfast. They give him a nod by way of greeting, which Dick returns as he walks past them and directly down into the Batcave, taking the stairs slowly on account of his sore body. 

And he abruptly stops, because a very bizarre sight greets him once he takes three steps down the stairs. 

A very bizarre sight indeed. 

He blinks three times in quick succession to ensure that his vision isn’t failing him, and then three times more in surprise and confusion, before he takes an about-face and walks back up the stairs to come to a stop directly in front of his family. 

“Guys.” 

Jason and Bruce look up, but Tim continues typing on his laptop. Dick opens his mouth slowly, thoughtfully, and aims his question at the two members of his family who meet his gaze. 

“Why is there a cow in the Batcave?” 

Jason raises his eyebrows and blinks at him. 

Tim just sighs, and without a pause in his endless stream of typing, he answers: “ _That_ … would be bat-cow.” 

Dick blinks again, opening his mouth and closing it like a fish as he decides how exactly he wishes to respond to that new bit of information. “That… uh… okay.” He scratches his head. “That still doesn’t answer my question.” 

“It’s Damian’s.” 

Dick blinks yet again, and decides that he’s tired of blinking and he’s officially had to ask _far_ too many questions for so early in the morning. “And who is Damian?” 

“New Robin.” Dick doesn’t miss the bitter quality in Tim’s voice. “He brought it home and Bruce let him keep it. The kid rescued it from a butcher.” 

“Oh…kay.” Dick sighs and runs his hand through his hair. “Any other new wildlife around here I should know about?” 

This time the answer comes from Bruce. His eyes take on a terrifyingly mischievous sparkle. “There’s also the turkey.” 

“A turkey?” Dick asks faintly. 

“His name is Jerry.” 

“Ah.” The knowledge that there is a cow and a turkey named Jerry in the Batcave and that it doesn’t seem to be bothering anyone (except maybe Tim for some reason) is just this side of too much for him to handle before noon. Dick just shakes his head. “I’m going back to bed.” 

  
Dick spends the rest of his day attempting to nap, drinking water, and forcing himself to eat. That evening, Jason and Dick are assigned to play Oracle while Tim and Bruce patrol. Dick is seated in a squishy office chair off to the side of Jason’s, who sits immediately in front of the Batcave computer. 

Everything is quiet - _too_ quiet - as they prepare for Tim and Bruce to raid the safe house of the gang they had been tracking for months. 

And then, Tim radios through the comm – “I don’t want to alarm anyone, but a warehouse in the docks district just blew up.” 

Dick chokes on a sudden guffaw. “I think Gotham’s residents would get nervous of something didn’t blow up at least biweekly,” he quips. 

“Good to be home, eh?” Jason asks good-naturedly. 

“It is,” Dick replies with a tiny smile. “It really is.” 

Tim calls out something about intercepting the gang activity and Bruce gives a curt reply, then the line falls quiet for a few more minutes, as do Jason and Dick. After a time, Jason speaks up quietly. “Have you ever noticed that Bruce’s Batman voice changes just _slightly_ depending on who he’s talking to?” 

Dick is silent for a minute, then bursts out into laughter. “Now that you mention it, holy _shit_!” he exclaims. “You’re so right - his voice is softer when he’s talking to Commissioner Gordon, and when he’s talking to Catwoman, it’s –” 

Jason cuts him off, “Lower, and the only person who it’s even _lower_ with is –” 

“Superman,” the finish together, with identical grins. 

Seemingly encouraged by their gleeful conversation, Jason states, “Villains like to try to imitate his voice, you know.” 

Dick’s eyes dance with laughter. “Oh, I know. I’ve heard it. You know what started it?” 

“What?” 

“I pissed Bruce off on patrol way back when I was Robin, and after he stalked off, I imitated him being all snarly and dark. Harley Quinn apparently heard me, and she got everyone else doing it too. It drives Bruce crazy. He _still_ doesn’t know I’m the one that started it.” 

“My lips are sealed,” Jason says with a smirk. 

At that moment, the large Batcomputer screen lights up with an alert. Jason’s grin dies instantly and he swears loudly. “Superman’s calling.” 

“What’s going on? Is it a league emergency?” 

Dick’s fear turns to confusion, however, when Jason presses the answer key and Superman’s face appears on the large screen. “What’d he do this time?” Jason asks, with pained irritation in his voice. 

Superman’s giant face smiles as he chuckles warmly. “He’s fine, Jason. The boys went to bed two hours ago.” 

Jason checks his watch. “It’s ten-thirty.” 

“The boys like to go to bed early. They’re usually holed up in Jon’s room when they’re home, anyway. Damian has been surprisingly well behaved this time.” 

Jason cocks an eyebrow. “Oh, really?” 

“Yes, he’s been great. Jon’s certainly happy to have him here.” 

“I bet.” Jason’s eyes sparkle. Dick knows that look. Dick has _seen_ that look. Dick has been on the receiving end of that look a few too many times. That’s Jason’s ‘I-know-something-you-don’t, but-I’m-not-telling’ look. 

Dick interrupts, realizing who they are talking about. “Wait… Clark, the new Robin is with _you_?” 

“Yes, and he’s doing fine. But I wasn’t calling to talk about him, actually; I was calling to talk to you.” 

“…Oh.” 

“It’s good to see you. How are you holding up?” 

He pauses, considering how truthful he wants to be. “I’ve been better, Clark,” he eventually musters. 

An uncertain look crosses Superman’s handsome features. “I heard you were in Metropolis,” he asks carefully. 

"Yeah. I’m sorry, I wasn’t… I wasn’t trying to take over your territory or anything. I was, ah… I was off-duty,” he finishes lamely. “I wasn’t… I wouldn’t-” 

Clark smiles kindly. “That’s not why I was asking, Dick. It’s just a bit jarring to hear that you were in my city the whole time and I didn’t know. I wish I could have helped. I just hope you know that you could have come to me if you needed. And you can still come to me now.” 

Dick feels shame burning at his cheeks. It’s humbling to have his idol asking about his wellbeing and so freely offering his help. “Thank-you, Clark,” he manages. 

Superman nods. “I’m sure you all are in the middle of a patrol, so I will let you go. I hope to see you guys again soon. Take care of him, Jason.” 

Jason gives a terse nod and says “Always”, and Clark’s image disappears. 

Dick breathes out a heavy sigh and runs his hand through his hair. The mood in the room is now heavier than it was just minutes ago. “Look, Jason… you shouldn’t have to take care of me. That’s not your job.” 

“It is,” Jason counters without turning to look at him. “We’re a family.” 

“I should be the one taking care of all of _you_ ,” Dick laments. “I should have been there for you. This whole time. And I wasn’t. And I’m sorry.” 

Jason waves his hand dismissively, looking up coordinates with the other hand. “You have been going through a rough patch, Dick. That’s understandable.” 

“I don’t just mean over the past year, Jason.” 

The younger man swivels his chair to face Dick with confusion in his eyes. “What are you talking about?” 

Dick hangs his head. “I mean… the whole time. I wasn’t there for you when you became Robin. Bruce is a lot to deal with, and I should have been there to help. I wasn’t there much before you died, and I can’t help but think… if I had been, then –” 

“No,” Jason says sternly. “I know where you’re going with this, and no. It wouldn’t have changed the outcome. Honestly. I was a loose cannon. Having Bruce there was bad enough – I don’t think having yet another person lecturing me for being reckless would have made it any better. I still would have died, Dick.” 

“I should have been there. As your brother.” 

The other man’s eyes soften. “You can’t change the past, Dick. I’m just glad you’re here now.” 

Dick answers earnestly. “Me too.” 

  
Once again, Dick struggles to sleep that night. He lays in bed for hours, practicing breathing exercises. He eventually falls asleep, only to be immersed in more nightmares. He doesn’t remember all of them, for which he counts himself lucky, because the ones he does remember terrify him. 

The most vivid one involves being in Happy Harbor again, back with the team. Back in Mount Justice. Back with Wally. In his dream, he struggles to maintain his sobriety, like he does now, and in his dream, he relapses. He has a drink, and he hates himself for it, but he can’t stop. He downs a bottle, and then a second. His dream flows and changes after that, almost mimicking the feeling of being drunk – he goes on missions and completely botches them, he drinks more, he fights with Wally. The dream somehow concludes with him blowing up Mount Justice – again— but with Wally still inside it. 

He wakes up frozen, eyes wide, and he doesn’t move until the tears on his cheeks are cold and Bruce comes to check on him. Seeing the streaks across his face, Bruce just slides into his bed and holds him. 

Dick cries in his arms until he falls asleep. This time, thankfully, he doesn’t dream. 

  
Wally’s thoughts are becoming muddled. He is increasingly confused when thinking back on the timeline of events he had experienced while stuck in the speed force. 

He remembers running alongside Jason’s car as Jason drives him to Planned Parenthood for testing, and Wally cries and places his hand on top of Dick’s as Dick explains to the staff what he had been doing. He had seen Dick do all of it, of course, but having it come from his lips and being able to hear his internal reflections on what he had been doing? It was heartbreaking. The part that got him the most was when Dick explained the exact moment when he realized he didn’t like having sex anymore. 

“At first, I did it to feel good. Of course there’s all of the usual reasons for whoring around - feeling desired and wanted and whatever - but there was also the factor of the self-destruction that felt just _so_ good. It helped express the pain that I can’t put into words. It helped channel my pain. It’s easier to deal with physical pain than emotional pain. And doing something so awful and degrading made it even better. It made it even easier to hate myself.” 

From there, he followed Dick back to the psychiatrist’s office and to the manor. He watched him break down and collapse into Bruce’s arms. He watched him while he slept. 

It is around the time when Dick wakes up the next morning that he realizes he is losing time. One minute, the clock reads 4:45 AM and Dick was restlessly turning from side to side, and the next, the clock reads 7:08 and Jason is striding into Dick’s room and offering him breakfast. 

Over time, his consciousness starts fading and events start to skip. One minute Dick is in the dining room eating with his family and the clock reads 12:33 and the next, Dick is sitting alone in the living room and crying over a picture of himself and Wally and the clock reads 6:35 and the sun is rising in the east. 

_Am I going to skip through time until Dick is an old man? Am I going to have to watch him and everyone else I’ve ever known die?_ Wally contemplates an eternity in this purgatory. Will he be forced to remain there for the remainder of time, immortal but isolated from ever interacting with other human beings? He feels a panic set in. 

_I need to figure out how to get out of here._


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's song: Unsteady by X Ambassadors. (Playlist can be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/kajnsn/playlist/796vN4CzQmr7lc3ugl1kQ3).)
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: alcoholism/underage drinking, themes of addiction and withdrawal.

When Dick wakes up the next morning, his first thought is that Jason wasn’t exaggerating - day three is the _worst_. His head hurts. His muscles feel like acid. His whole body is sweating. He smells like rotten vegetables. He had no idea sobering up would be quite like this. If he had, he isn’t sure he would have quit. 

But here he is, and he isn’t going back. 

Once the sun has been up for about an hour, Dick sits up in bed and pulls on a pair of flannel pajama pants over his boxers and a ratty old t-shirt over his torso. When Jason comes into his room and greets him all too cheerfully, Dick looks up at him beneath heavily hooded eyes and quietly asks, “Don’t leave me alone today. Like, not even for a second.” 

Jason pauses in his task of stacking Dick’s breakfast on his desk and turns to face him. “You doing okay, big guy?” 

Tears fill Dick’s eyes. “I want a drink so badly,” he whispers. 

Jason levels him with a hard stare. “Dick. I need you to be honest with me for a second.” 

“Okay.” 

“Do you have a means of getting liquor? I need to know if I’m going to keep you away from it.” 

“No,” Dick answers shakily. “I don’t have any stashed away. I left all of my cash back at my apartment in Metropolis. The only way I can think of to get it is to sneak into a bar and convince a stranger to buy me a drink.” 

“I don’t think this needs to be said, but I’m gonna say it anyway – don’t do that.” 

Dick chuckles in spite of his current misery. “Noted.” 

“Seriously though, are you okay?” Dick finds panic rising in his chest, which he suppresses. 

_I’m going to be fine. I’m going to be fine. Be fine. Be fine. Fine. Fine. Fine._

“You know how you say something over and over in your head and it starts to sound weird?” 

“Yeah?” 

“Yeah.” _Fine. Fine. Fine. Fine. **Fine.**_

Jason just smiles sympathetically and claps him on the shoulder. “Hang in there. I’ve got nothing going on today and I can spend the whole day with you. Get yourself ready and meet me downstairs.” 

  
Dick eats breakfast, showers and dresses himself, and then makes his way downstairs. The familiar sound of voices ringing out from the kitchen feels like a bittersweet comfort. As he rounds the corner, he sees Tim, Bruce and Alfred in the kitchen. 

Bruce doesn’t acknowledge his presence and continues reading the newspaper. Tim offers him a raised eyebrow in greeting and Alfred gives him a courteous nod. “Master Dick, good morning.” 

“Morning, Alfred. Where’s Jason?” 

“He went to the roof,” Tim answers, spooning his cereal. 

“I will meet him up there in a minute. Alfred, Tim… can I have a moment with Bruce please?” 

Tim’s lips thin into a hard line, but there is the scrape of the legs of the chair on the hardwood floor as he stands and leaves the dining room. Alfred sets the rag in his hand on the kitchen counter and follows suit with a respectful nod. 

Bruce looks up from the paper once the other two men have left the room. “Dick. How are you doing?” 

“Badly,” Dick admits with a wince. “I… I actually wanted to talk to you. To ask you for something.” 

“Ask away.” 

“Can you… can you get rid of all of the alcohol from the house?” 

Bruce sits up a little in his chair. “Are you feeling okay?” 

Dick’s bottom lip trembles. “I’m struggling, Bruce. It’s hard. It’s like… I’ve been living with a veil between myself and the rest of the world, and it feels like that veil has been ripped away. I… I miss the protection of the veil. The world just feels so raw and real. It hurts just to be alive. I hate it.” He takes in a shaky breath. “But I know if I start drinking again, I won’t be able to stop on my own and then I will keep on doing this forever. And I know I can’t do that. So, I don’t want the temptation in the house. I need you to get rid of all of it.” 

“Of course, Dick. I already have.” 

Another shaky breath. “Thank-you, Bruce. And… make sure I’m supervised.” 

“Supervised?” 

He nods. “I used to sneak out to buy liquor with a fake ID.” He pulls a stack of cards out of his pocket and tosses them onto the table in front of Bruce. “Here are all of my ATM cards, credit cards and fake ID’s. Lock up any cash you have and don’t tell me where it is. I don’t want any access at all to anything that could help me purchase liquor.” 

Dick half-expects Bruce to protest and ask if this is really necessary, but thankfully, he just nods in understanding. “I will, Dick. I’m proud of you.” 

The words are spoken very matter-of-factly and devoid of emotion, but it makes Dick smile all the same. “Thank-you, Bruce.” 

  
Dick heads up to the roof to meet Jason. As he climbs the ladder, like he had a thousand times over, he feels a weight lifting from his chest. There’s something about being up high that makes him feel so much more clear-headed. A love of heights has been branded into him since childhood. He steps out onto the roof and sees Jason perched, with legs dangling, on the edge. 

Wordlessly, he sits down next to Jason, who acknowledges him with a nod. They sit in companionable silence for a few minutes, each left to his own thoughts. 

Dick reflects on the events of the past few days. He felt a little more lucid than he had the day before. His head still hurts, but he had almost gotten used to that at this point. He refuses to take even a low-grade painkiller for it, and he refuses to touch coffee – he came to the conclusion that he doesn’t want any unnecessary chemicals in his system, aside from the ones prescribed to him. 

Jason cut through the silence, giving him a gentle nudge on the shoulder. “How you holding up?” 

“Honestly?” 

“Honestly.” 

“Terrible.” 

Jason chuckled. “Good.” 

“…Good?” 

“Yeah. Good. That means you’re doing this for real. Anyone who can make it to day three without complaints is lying through their teeth about their sobriety.” 

“I suppose.” 

A few more moments of silence fill the air, and Dick is the one to break it this time. 

“Thanks for being so cool about all of this, Jayce. For picking me up from Metropolis, and for keeping Tim and Bruce from beating the shit out of me.” 

Jason only smirks. “Who says I’m being cool about it? In reality I’m only protecting you until you get back to full strength so I can beat the shit out of you myself.” 

Dick rolls his eyes and gently bumps his shoulder against Jason’s. “Well, thanks regardless. I owe you one.” 

“You owe me several. But don’t mention it. It’s what brothers do.” 

  
Roy comes to visit Dick at the manor later on that day. Apparently he’s got quite a bit of life experience regarding addiction, so Jason asked him to come over to share his wisdom. Or something. Roy strides into the manor as Dick is sitting down at the kitchen table with a bottle of water and a magazine. 

Dick recoils at the flinching look Roy gives him. “Dick. You look like _shit_.” 

“I look about as good as I feel, then,” he deadpans, because he’s on day three and it fucking _sucks_. 

“You’ll get better. Power through it. You just need to get back to proper nutrition and exercise.” Dick nods along halfheartedly. “How long?” 

Dick doesn’t have to ask what he means. “Three days sober.” 

Roy gives him a sympathetic look. “Day three of a withdrawal is the hardest. Though I’m sure Jason told you that.” Dick nods, grimacing, sucking down some water from his water bottle. “What’s your plan?” 

“My plan?” 

Roy nods, his expression serious. “You need a plan, Dick. Day three may be the hardest in regards to withdrawal symptoms, but it doesn’t just stop here. Addiction never goes away. You need a plan to keep yourself sober.” 

Dick blinks at him. “I… I guess I hadn’t really thought that far ahead.” 

“Are you on meds?” 

“Yeah. Jay set me up with his old psychiatrist.” 

Roy nods his approval. “Good. You should see Black Canary too, on top of all of that. She helped me a lot when I was going through it all.” 

Dick turns the suggestion over in his mind and decides it isn’t a terrible idea. “I’ll have Bruce give her a call.” 

Roy fetches a pop from the fridge and pulls out a chair to sit down next to him. “Other than that, how’ve you been?” 

Dick gives him a look as he takes another swig from his water bottle and sighs, deciding to give the same answer to him as he gave to Clark. “I’ve been better.” 

“You’ve also been worse.” 

Dick smiles in spite of himself. “Yeah. I have.” 

Roy gives him a lopsided grin. “Seriously though. You look like shit. Nutrition and exercise have _got_ to be a part of your plan. When’s the last time you lifted weights?” 

Dick frowns. “I… I don’t know. How long’s it been since I quit the team?” 

“A year and six months.” 

Dick runs his hand through his shaggy hair in amazement. “Wow. Seriously?” 

“Yeah.” They fall into silence, Dick sipping from his water and Roy from his soda. 

Eventually, Dick breaks the silence. “What made _you_ finally decide to do it?” 

“What? Get sober?” 

“Yeah.” 

Roy pauses for a long moment. “Lian.” 

Dick smiles gently. “How old is she now?” 

“Two.” Roy returned his smile. “You should come see her tomorrow. She’s grown up a lot since you left.” 

“I bet.” Dick shakes his head. “I can’t though. I’m currently on house arrest.” 

“That’s shitty.” 

“It’s deserved,” he says simply. “I don’t mind it. But I will come see her as soon as I’m able. How’s she doing?” 

“She’s walking now, Dick. She’s walking, and running, and practicing archery. Artemis got her a kid-sized bow for Christmas and she’s hell-bent on destroying my house with it.” He chuckles. “Artemis thinks it’s hilarious, but I’m repaying the favor when Lian’s cousin is born. Then we’ll see who has the last laugh.” 

“Lian’s cousin?” Dick’s eyes widen in realization. “Wait, Artemis is…?” 

Roy smiles sheepishly. “Not sure I’m supposed to be telling you or not, but yeah. Pregnant. Three months along.” 

Dick feels cold water down his spine. “Who’s…?” 

Roy runs a hand through his auburn hair. “I keep forgetting how much you’ve missed. A lot has changed while you’ve been away.” 

Dick’s voice is quiet, barely audible. “Jason said that too.” 

“Yeah, the Demon Brat is another issue entirely,” Roy chuckles. Dick scowls and makes a mental note to ask Jason about that later, but ignores it for now. He wants to know who Artemis is with. 

Almost as if reading his mind, Roy says, “She’s with Kaldur. He and Artemis got together three months after Wally disappeared. I… I know you loved Wally and it probably feels like a betrayal, and it’s certainly going to take some getting used to for you, but I want you to give them a chance, Dick. They are _really_ good together.” 

“Y-yeah. Of course. I mean… I didn’t expect her to wait around forever,” he concedes, heart pounding. 

Before he is able to process the news any further, Dick’s water bottle is yanked out of his hand and he cries out in surprise. Jason laughs from behind him. 

“You’ve lost your edge, Dickie-bird. Wanna spar?” he mimes punching Dick in the head. 

His head throbs at the very thought. “Maybe after I’ve gotten some solo training in. And once my headache goes away.” 

“It’ll be a while before THAT happens,” Jason chuckles knowingly. 

  
That night, Dick opts out of playing Oracle due to his pounding headache and nausea. Which is fine with him, because he would be Oracle alongside Tim and Tim is still being somewhat frosty towards him. He can’t help but wonder how long Tim is going to hold this against him. They used to be so close, and now… 

He doesn’t sleep that night. Just like the night before, he can feel his sleeping medicine making him drowsy, but his body fights off sleep at every turn. 

_Sleep would come so much easier if I could just have a drink._

He jolts up in bed and shakes his head dramatically as if doing so can shake the thought out of his brain. 

He can’t drink. Even if he never gets any sleep ever again, he can’t drink anymore. He can’t let his family down, not any more than he already has. 

Dick lays sprawled out on his mattress until the sun comes back up.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's song: "Never Be Like You" by Flume ft. Kai. (Playlist can be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/kajnsn/playlist/796vN4CzQmr7lc3ugl1kQ3).)
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: mentions of self-destructive behavior, brief mention of suicidal thoughts, detailed references to how alcoholism affects the brain.

Mercifully, Jason has allowed him to loiter around his room until about noon before knocking on his door and instructing him to get ready for the day. He showers, throws on some of his old clothes – which are too big for him now, he notes; lack of proper nutrition and exercise had left him unusually skinny. He shakes it off, deciding to start lifting weights again as soon as he is feeling physically capable. He meets Jason in the kitchen and follows him to the garage, then settles himself into the passenger seat of Jay’s favorite vehicle – a black Mustang. 

Jason drives them towards the central part of the city. It’s the first time in four days since he’s left the house, and it feels odd to watch the cityscape scroll past him as he stares out the passenger side window. It feels all the more odd to look at his reflection in the glass. He’d been purposely avoiding mirrors since he returned from Metropolis, as he had figured he probably looks like shit. And he wasn’t wrong. 

Thankfully, Jason’s first order of business is to take him to a barber shop. Dick’s hair has gone limp and is long enough to be pulled back and tied up on top of his head, and he has greasy stubble in unattractive patches across his face. Dick had cut his hair once while he was living in Metropolis – by himself, with a dull pair of scissors. He recalls shaving his face from time to time, but doesn’t remember whether or not he ever changed the razor blade. Probably not. It must have been blunt by the end of his stay in Metropolis. 

The barber takes one look at his hair and gives a great ‘harrumph’. He shampoos Dick’s hair, applies a heavy dose of conditioner and rinses, then sets to work on trimming the raggedy locks. He cuts it down to an attractive fade cut – closely buzzed at the sides with a little more length on top. He then gives him an alarmingly close shave with a single-blade razor. 

He stares at himself in the mirror across from his seat as the barber works on him. He looks… almost like he did before. Minus a little muscle mass and with slightly darker circles under his eyes, but he figures he can rectify that in time. 

After the shampoo, haircut and meticulous shave, he feels clean – for the first time in almost a year. He thanks the barber profusely and proudly strides up to Jason, who inspects him thoughtfully, turning his head from side to side with his strong fingers before giving an approving nod. 

Then, they file back into his car and take the five minute drive to the psychiatrist’s office. Jason waits in the lobby and shoos Dick back to where Dr. Hudson is waiting, and she greets him with the same kind smile he remembers from their first meeting. “Hello, Richard. You look much improved from when I last saw you.” 

He can’t help but smile. The woman just seems so genuine and warm. “Thank-you.” 

She turns to her computer and begins typing notes. “Now. I understand that you’re having trouble sleeping?” 

“Yes.” 

“How many hours per night have you actually been sleeping since I last saw you?” 

Dick pauses to consider. The past few days had felt like one long, strung-out blur. He honestly can’t remember much of the night aside from wishing he could sleep and waking up from malevolent dreams. He shakes his head slightly, squeezing his eyes shut against the onslaught of memories of his dreams. His voice takes on a desperately high pitch. “Zero last night, probably only three or four the night before, and maybe forty-five minutes the night before that.” 

“Hm. That won’t do,” she says conversationally as she types the information into her files. “That’s no way to make a proper recovery.” 

Dick nods slowly. “And… there’s something else.” 

Dr. Hudson turns from her computer to Dick. “What is it?” 

He’s not sure if Dr. Hudson can do anything about the contents of his dreams, but it’s worth a shot. “I’m having… nightmares,” he admits hesitantly. “Awful, real-feeling nightmares. About losing people I love. About the people I have already lost.” 

She nods slowly, her warm gaze never leaving his face. “I’m not sure if this will make you feel better or worse, but that’s very normal when recovering from alcoholism.” 

For a moment, Dick is too taken aback to form an opinion on it one way or another, because - _Alcoholism_. This is the first time he’s heard it put in such inescapable terms; it has such a finality to it. There’s no avoiding it once it’s labeled in such a way. He’s… an alcoholic. 

He sighs. “Why does it happen? These dreams, I mean. What’s causing it? I didn’t used to have so many nightmares before I started drinking, or even while I was actively drinking.” 

“You have had alcohol in your system for twelve months straight, Richard,” she answers, her voice stern but kind. “Your brain has gotten used to its presence. It has figured out how to adapt. That’s the wonderful thing about brains.” She sighs, turning back to her computer. “They’re remarkably flexible.” 

“So how does that work with… alcoholism?” The word feels foreign on his tongue, but he may as well get used to saying it. 

“It’s a concept called Neural plasticity, and it means that your brain, over time, can be reprogrammed.” She stops typing and turns back to him. “It’s adapted to the alcohol that has been in your system twenty-four hours a day for the past year. Your brain _expects_ it now. To your brain, alcohol is just another chemical added to the cocktail of hormones and other substances filling up your brain at any given moment. If you remove any chemical from the brain at any time, it goes into panic mode. Even the alcohol.” She smiles wryly. “And now that it’s gone? This is your brain, going into panic mode.” 

Dick stares at her for a moment, dumbstruck. “So… what do I do?” 

Mischief dances in her eyes. “Well, not drinking anymore is a solid start.” 

Dick smiles at her and chuckles in spite of herself. No wonder Jason likes her so much. “Done. No more alcohol. Any other advice?” 

“We’ll increase your dose of sleeping medication,” she says, pulling out her prescription pad and scribbling out a new dosage. “That should help you sleep while your body readjusts. Just to warn you though, this will probably make a little lethargic during the day, so don’t be operating any vehicles until you know how it affects you.” She gives him a sharp look. “I know how much you boys enjoy the Gotham, ah… ‘night life’… but I don’t want to be seeing any evening appearances from a certain blue-striped vigilante any time soon, especially if said young man is driving that slick motorcycle that he seems to favor.” 

In that moment, it’s like he has just fallen off a grappling line because holy shit, she _knows_. Once his brain reboots, he manages to stammer out, “I, uh… I won’t be driving any cars or motorcycles or other… automobiles… any time soon, I promise. My family pretty much has me on house arrest.” 

“Good,” she says with a satisfied smile. “And the increased dosage should help with the nightmares. It will put you into a deeper sleep faster.” She tears the script off the pad and hands it to him. “It will take time to re-train your brain though, Richard. Give it time. Quitting any chemical cold-turkey is a shock to your system, and you are experiencing side effects as a direct result of it.” 

“Should I have… I don’t know… weaned myself off more slowly?” 

“No.” She gives him that piercing look again. “No, because can you honestly say you would have quit completely if you had? If you’re going to be done with it, then be done with it. Don’t half-ass it, or else you will still pick it up as a crutch when times get tough.” He nods in understanding, and her eyes soften. “It’s going to be a little rough for a little while, Dick, but you will get through it. You and Jason may not be blood related, but you’re made of the same stuff. You’ll bounce back.” 

His mouth pulls up into a genuine smile. “Thank-you.” 

  
Dick’s mind roams for the rest of the afternoon. When Dick and Jason get back to the manor, Dick attempts to nap. His eyelids droop, his body drags, and his sheets feel _so_ comfortable against his skin – but he hovers somewhere between awake and dozing, never able to cross the line into unconsciousness. He wills himself to fall into the heavy feeling of slumber, wills himself to feel that brief moment of vertigo before sleep overtakes him, but he never does. After an hour or so, he gives up and rolls back out of bed. 

As he is sitting up and stretching, his bedroom door swings open and Tim walks into the room to bring him his afternoon round of antidepressants and a water bottle. There is an edge of definite irritation to his voice. “You still lying in bed?” 

Dick just sighs. He doesn’t feel like fighting with him right now. “I need time to recover, Tim.” 

Clearly, Tim is still harboring resentment towards him. He doesn’t say anything though; he just sighs, then turns to leave. 

Guilt and a flash of anger jolt through Dick. He already feels ready to boil over, and he notes with disdain that his emotional threshold is significantly smaller than it used to be. “Wait.” 

Tim sits down with a slow head-shake and gives him a look. “What?” 

Dick bows his head slightly. “Do you know why I left Gotham?” 

Tim pauses for a long moment. “Honestly, no. I’ve never really thought about why. I was too stuck on being pissed that you left.” 

Recoiling slightly from the obvious verbal jab, Dick presses onward. “I left because I wanted to self-destruct,” he says dryly. “I wanted to self-destruct, and I didn’t want anyone to stop me.” He doesn’t even know why he’s telling him this. To earn his forgiveness, maybe. To get him off his back. To be understood. 

Tim’s sour expression deepens into a glower, and his voice is flat when he replies. “Why?” 

“I couldn’t handle it, Tim. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to collapse and explode all at once. There’s just no good outlet for that kind of feeling, you know?” He pauses. He isn’t even sure where he is going with this conversation. He just wants Tim to _get it_. “I… I’ve never wanted to die before, Tim. Never. But I did, then. I did, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. I almost destroyed myself.” 

Tim is shaking his head slowly again, in disbelief this time. “What did you _do_ in Metropolis, Dick?” 

“Drinking, mostly. I was bad before I left Metropolis. You… you saw it. But when I left, it all got worse. I drank. All the time. I couldn’t even get outta bed unless I had a drink. And I hung out in bars all the time. I got mistaken as a prostitute.” Tim’s gaze had been at Dick’s feet, but at that, he looks up sharply. “Yeah. Before you ask, I did it. Drinking is an expensive habit, after all.” 

“But… why didn’t you just ask us for help? We would have helped you. We could have figured it out. Together. We’ve all lost people before, Dick; we could have-” 

“It’s not that easy,” he cuts off sharply. “It’s not like it was for me with Tula, or Jason, or… or anyone before. It’s different.” 

Tim glares. “It’s not.” 

Dick leans back in surprise. “What?” 

“It’s not different, Dick. We’ve all lost people before. And we will lose people again. _It’s no different._ ” Angry tears shone in the corner of Tim’s eyes. 

Dick feels a flush rise to his face as latent, simmering anger swelled and boiled over. The argument that he had unknowingly internally prepared came spilling from his lips. “Who are _you_ to tell me that? You have no idea what I’ve been going through over this past year. We’re not just superheroes. We’re humans too, and we break down when shit gets bad!” 

Tim glares at Dick through his tears, and his voice is low when he finally responds. “Do you think I haven’t thought about that? Do you _really_ think I haven’t been wrestling with it since the day I became Robin? I’ve just realized that it doesn’t matter. _I_ don’t matter. I am only one person, Dick, and there’s a whole world out there full of billions more people who have lives and wants and needs just like me. Do you really mean to tell me that one person matters more than the rest?” 

“Of course not, Tim, I –” 

Tim cuts him off with a punched-out, “No. Let me say this. Just… let me get this out.” Dick shuts his mouth with an audible click and nods, so Tim continues. “We aren’t important, Dick. When we take up the cowl, our lives aren’t our own anymore. We don’t get to do this part-time. Either go all in, or get out. When I became Robin, I didn’t choose this life because it’s glamorous, or for vengeance, or for validation. I chose it because it’s _necessary_. And I haven’t lost sight of that since the day I became Robin.” He sighs deeply. “I get that your reasons for becoming a superhero are different than mine, and that’s fine. Everyone joins this life for different reasons.” He runs his hand through his hair, pulling at the ends of the strands in frustration, and his voice starts to crack. “But you ran away. We are expected to be at our best when disaster strikes, and you turned and fucking _ran_. You left us all here to deal with the mess without you. And I’m not sure I can forgive that right now.” 

“But I came back,” Dick says weakly. 

“Sure, you’re back now, but… Dick, do you even know what we went through while you were gone? You expect to come waltzing back into our lives like nothing even happened, but you broke my trust, Dick! Trust is everything in our business! We put our lives in each other’s hands. How can I do that with you now, while worrying in the back of my head that you’re going to skip town the next time you get overwhelmed?” Tim’s voice breaks into a small sob. “How can I trust that you won’t take off next time, too?” 

Dick’s gaze falls to the floor. “Do you… do you not want me to be Nightwing anymore?” 

Tim’s lips thin into a hard line, and tears shine in his eyes. “Do what you want, Dick. I’m not telling you not to do it. If you want to be a superhero, then _be a fucking superhero_ , but don’t do it lightly, because I don’t think this family could handle it if you ran away again.” 

Dick is shocked into silence and watches the back of Tim’s head as he storms out of the room.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's song: Girl Crush by Little Big Town. (There's a scene in the middle of the chapter that was directly inspired by this song.)
> 
> (Playlist can be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/kajnsn/playlist/796vN4CzQmr7lc3ugl1kQ3).)
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: Description of a panic attack.

After Tim storms out of his room, Dick is left to sit in silence. Panic rises through him and he curls into himself, wrapping his arms around his knees and rocking back and forth on the floor. 

His mind – his traitorous, awful mind, stuck in panic-mode, flits back to the last time he can remember feeling this way – panicked and helpless, yet _sober_. Before Wally left the team. Before he blew up Mount Justice. Before the younger generation joined them. It was back when it was just the six of them. 

Memories flood him – memories that he hadn’t touched in months. 

Martian Manhunter had them stuck in a mental simulation designed to make them fail, no matter what they tried. It was supposed to teach them some sort of lesson, though he’s having a hard time remembering exactly what the lesson was supposed to be. Something about how to handle failure, maybe? He isn’t sure. 

Either way, it sent the team reeling for weeks afterwards. It affected all six of them, in very different ways. Dick remembers sitting through countless therapy sessions in the aftermath. His already-existing PTSD took a nosedive. He would wake up in the middle of the night with his mouth open in a silent scream as the nightmare of Wally’s body, burning in the final explosion as Dick grasped his hand, faded from behind his eyelids. 

He tries to calm himself down with breathing exercises, tries to bring himself back to the present, but his mind is on a roll with reminding him of all of the fucked-up things that he’s seen and done in his life, because the next thing he thinks of is how he used to jerk off while thinking about Wally and Artemis. 

At first, he had blamed it on teenage hormones and a love life that had been stunted by his early-onset vigilante career. He spends a _lot_ of time around his team, and they _are_ some incredibly attractive people, after all, so he had figured it’s only natural that he might develop some lustful feelings for a few of them at some point. But it wasn’t anyone else – his fixation was pretty much exclusive to his best friend and the team’s resident archer. He even entertained the idea that he might have unrequited feelings for Artemis, but quickly dismissed the idea as he realized that he wasn’t interested in thinking about her _that way_ outside of the context of being with Wally. 

That revelation was new to him at the time. Was he gay? He bounced it around in his head for a while, trying to piece together the reasoning behind it, but hadn’t truly put it together until late one night after a mission with the team. 

After the mission, everyone had stayed over at Mount Justice – they all had rooms there, even if they were rarely used, and after they had showered and changed, they played video games until their bodies started to lag and they finally admitted that they were exhausted. Then, they each retreated to their own respective rooms. A few hours into his restless sleep, Dick had gotten up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water and froze as he heard breathy moaning as he rounded the corner towards the kitchen. 

His wide eyes took in the sight in front of him. Wally, in such a compromising position – pressing Artemis against the wall, flushed face, eyes closed, groaning as he sucked and licked at her exposed neck, blissfully unaware of the world around him. For a fleeting moment, he got to imagine that it was himself there instead, trapped between the wall and Wally’s warm body, threading his fingers through the speedster’s hair, letting out those little whimpers that Artemis was letting out now. He imagined that Wally was pushing his knee in between his legs instead of Artemis’s, that it was him rutting down on Wally’s thigh instead of her. He imagined that it was himself that Wally loved, adored, instead of Artemis. 

It took every bit of his deeply-ingrained stealth skills to sneak back to his room without being seen, and he did his best to forget. But he couldn’t, and from there, it only got worse. 

Every time the team was together, Dick would stare at Artemis’s long blonde hair, her cherry-red lips, her gorgeous almond-shaped eyes. He wanted everything she had – her captivating smirk, that sexy giggle. 

He had it so bad. 

He wanted to press his lips against hers, because he knew that she would taste like Wally. 

He wanted to sneak into the showers and steal her body wash so he can smell just the way Wally liked. 

He would lie awake night after night, knowing, just _knowing_ that Artemis was in Wally’s bed. He knew she was tangled up in his sheets, tangled up with him, and it killed him. He knew that Wally’s eyes, his hands, his _mouth_ was on her, and he hated it. 

He envied her. 

He hated her. 

He wanted to _be_ her. 

How fucked up was that? 

  
Dick doesn’t realize that he has spent the past hour frozen to his floor in the manor, blinded by memories. He struggles to breathe and he hears his heartbeat pounding, increasing in volume inside his sensitive eardrums, growing incrementally louder with each beat blending in with footsteps coming up the stairs, and he hears a voice that he knows so well warbling and calling out “ROY! Help!” and his whole being is spinning even though his eyes are squeezed shut against the stiflingly warm air. Another voice, also familiar, joins the first one and they’re shouting something he can’t understand and the voices come closer and a pair of hands are on him moments later. 

His world slows to a stop. 

The hands are massaging down his back, up his shoulders, running comfortingly over his arms and he didn’t realize just how tense his body was until he relaxed under the touch. He allows the hands to gently pry his white-knuckled fists from around his knees and slowly roll him over on his side. 

He looks up as his consciousness swims in and out, and he thinks he sees someone intimately familiar and it brings tears to his eyes as he mumbles at the figure hovering over him. The figure is speaking to him, but something feels off; it’s not the right voice, it’s too low and just a hint too rough, and his ears start ringing as he feels himself panicking all over again. 

The ringing in his ears fades and the voice comes back into his consciousness. At first it sounds all tinny as if he is speaking to him through a phone line and then it shifts until it sounds far away before it circles around him and he’s finally able to identify the voice as Roy. 

“Dick, it’s going to be okay. You’re here. I’ve got you. You’re safe. You’re loved.” 

Roy continues speaking to him gently, as if soothing a wounded animal, and in his dissociative state he thinks maybe the analogy isn’t too far off. He can see, as if from floating against the ceiling, as Roy strokes his hair and wipes the tears from his cheeks. He can see his own eyes – pale, haunted, hollow – and he slowly floats down to his body and blinks his stinging eyes until Roy’s gentle cadence stills into silence. 

  
Wally sees Dick smiling with Jason down in the bat-cave, then the next second, they’re gone. 

_Damn it all! Another time jump! How long has it been this time?_

Wally’s vision blurs and bursts as the orange fog around him swirls and rushes around him like a current. When the fog dissipates and Wally is back in the now-empty cave, he runs up the stairs and through the manor halls until he gets to Dick’s room and sees him curled up in a ball on the floor. 

He rushes to Dick’s side and shouts out “Help!”, even though he knows that nobody can hear him. His heart jumps when the door creaks open and Tim peers into the room, looking distracted, holding a tray of medication. “Hey, Dick, I brought your – oh my god…” He turns back into the hall and shouts out, “ROY! Help!”, and the redhead dashes into the room. 

Wally watches as Roy gingerly turns him over and he is sprawled out on his back with his head in Roy’s lap. Sweat drips down his brow. His eyelids flutter restlessly. His breathing is fast and shallow. Roy strokes his hair gently, murmuring reassuring phrases as Dick blinks and then drifts off to sleep. 

Kneeling down next to his shaking best friend, following Roy’s movements with his own hand, pretending that he was the one carding his fingers through his hair and not Roy, pretending he can be there for Dick, can show him all of the love he deserves, all of the love he’s been missing that he thinks he’s not worthy of receiving, trying to ignore the stab of jealousy that he’s now realizing is flooding through him like a cold tidal wave that Roy is serving this role that he so badly wants to serve. 

  
“Dick?” 

Dick turns his head slow and then blinks repeatedly, because he looks up with blurry eyes and sees a head of red hair above him. “Wally?” he croaks out. 

“No... Not Wally.” He feels the body beneath him shift slightly. He blinks, and Roy’s face comes into focus. 

Dick feels numb and his head threatens to float off again, but he digs his fingers into Roy’s jeans and holds himself there. “I’m back. I didn’t go far.” 

Roy’s expression shifts slightly, but he doesn’t ask what he meant by it. Instead, he gives Dick a grounding squeeze to the shoulder. “Welcome back, buddy. What do you need right now? Water? A blanket? A bath?” 

Dick just blinks a few more times as Roy continues to stroke his hair. “I need to move, I think. I need to feel my body underneath me.” 

Roy gives him a terse nod and helps him, slowly, to his feet. “Sparring always helped me through disassociating. It felt familiar and helped me get back underneath my skin. You up for it?” 

“Yeah,” Dick says dazedly. “Yeah. Just… just give me a few minutes.” 

Roy helped Dick sit up and stretch, then guided him to the kitchen to get a glass of water. After he takes a few minutes to breathe and re-center himself, they all make their way down to the bat cave. 

Settling into the ready position, he observes Roy across from him. He looks… healthy. Strong. Maybe it’s just been too long since he’s gotten a good look at him, but his muscles look bigger than he remembers - they bulge out of his arms and thighs intimidatingly. Dick shrinks away from him unconsciously, suddenly insecure of the way his clothes hang loosely off his slim frame. He had lost muscle mass over the past year, whereas Roy appears to have gained some. By comparison Dick feels weak, useless, frustrated with his own body. He feels like a child again. He feels _exposed_. 

He doesn’t have much time to ponder it though, because Roy is lunging towards him, throwing a powerful fist at his shoulder. A hasty sidestep takes Dick out of harm’s way, but it is a bit _too_ hasty, because Dick stumbles sideways and almost topples over, to regain his footing only moments before Roy swings at him again. It seems as if his limbs aren't following his instructions, not moving the way he wants them to. He feels slow, weak - uncomfortable in his own body. 

But Roy goes easy on him. He takes a step back and even Dick, in his slow and weakened state, can tell that Roy is purposely decelerating his movements to give him a chance to track them. He tentatively lunges and strikes out at Roy, and he lands a solid hit. 

As much as it makes him feel as if he is on training wheels, it also gives him a tiny bit of confidence. Slowly, with each strike towards Roy, he feels more at home in his body. It begins to feel more automatic. 

If Roy strikes towards his pelvis, he steps back and kicks out at his knees. 

If Roy tries to sweep his fee tout from under him, he vaults backwards and grabs his foot to throw him to the ground. 

He actually manages to land a few decent hits. He knows Roy isn’t giving him his all; he knows that, in a real fight, Roy would have him on his ass in sixty seconds flat. But Dick appreciates it nonetheless. Roy had been right – it’s helping him slide back under his skin. He feels his heartbeat in his chest and feels his ankles throb gently as his feet hit the ground when he completes a sloppy back-handspring – which, while unpleasant, serves to ground him even further. His throat is raw and dry from breathing so heavily, but he feels _alive_. 

A grin makes its way onto his face, and he can tell that it’s obvious because Jason is looking into his eyes, smiling and cheering from the sidelines – and he shoulder-checks Roy to knock him to the ground. 

“Not bad, man,” Roy chuckles, slightly out of breath as he pushes himself up and back to his feet. “You aren’t as rusty as I thought you’d be.” 

Dick beams and accepts a rough hug from the redhead. “Thanks, man. You were right – it helped.” 

  
That night, Dick slides into his bed with a smile. In spite of his panic attack that afternoon, he feels like - for the first time - he might be making progress.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's song: To Build A Home by The CInematic Orchestra and Patrick Watson (Playlist can be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/kajnsn/playlist/796vN4CzQmr7lc3ugl1kQ3).)
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: Damian's home!

It is all quiet in the manor. For once. 

Dick's senses perk up when he hears the front door open and shut. He doesn't hear footsteps following the noises, so he sneaks downstairs to investigate. 

He sees a boy in his mid-teens with olive skin and gelled-up black hair. He kicks his black Oxford shoes off by the door and tosses an overnight bag down on the sofa. Just as Dick is deciding between getting Bruce and confronting the kid about why he's in their house, Alfred makes his way around the corner and crosses in front of the stairs to stride through the parlor room and greet the boy. 

"Master Damian," Alfred greets cheerfully. "How was young master Kent's house?" 

Ah. Must be the new kid. 

"Boring, as usual," the boy drawls. “Is Father home?” 

“He is, but he is sleeping at this early hour.” 

“I shall rouse him.” 

“I would advise against that, sir.” 

“Is he cross with me?” The boy’s voice rises slightly in panic. “I haven’t done anything to earn his ire; I was on my best behavior with Jon!” 

“On the contrary, sir. He is pleased with your behavior. He simply endured a late patrol last night.” 

“Very well. I shall wait to seek out his presence.” 

Listening from the top of the stairs, Dick shakes his head slightly. _Who the fuck even is this kid? He talks like he just came out of a Jane Austen novel._

He listens for a moment more, but hears nothing, so he creeps back down the hall. _The new Robin is **weird**._

  
Around forty-five minutes later, Dick rolls out of bed again, giving up on sleep. He does a few sit-ups and push-ups, and is moderately disgusted with himself for how much effort they take. 

He gets himself a glass of water from the bathroom and drinks it down, then refills it and chokes down another. His psychiatrist told him to drink a gallon of water per day – something about helping him detox his system - and god damn it, he's doing this right. He’s wasted enough time by fucking around for the past year. 

He settles onto a pillow on his floor and practices the breathing exercises that Bruce had taught him many, many years ago. 

_Count your breaths. Focus on the numbers. In deep, and out strong. Count up until your thoughts stray from the numbers. Then start again at one._

Okay. He can do this. 

_In, out. **One**. In, out. **Two**. In, out - _

_I wonder if Tim will ever forgive me._

He curses his lack of concentration and exhales sharply, then starts again. 

_In, out. **One**. In, out. **Two**. In, out. **Three**. In, out. **Four**. In - _

_I don’t deserve to be forgiven._

Fuck. He did it again. 

He throws his head back and blinks away tears. _I have absolutely wrecked my mind over the past year._

  
He waits another hour before finally emerging from his room. As he sneaks down the stairs, he hears the new kid - Damian - talking once again, and freezes so he can eavesdrop. 

"I do not care. He has shown over the past year that he cannot be trusted." 

Jason's voice this time. "Give him a chance, Dami. He's been through a lot." 

Dick hears a pause before the small, furious voice echoes up the stairs. "We’ve _all_ been through a lot. We are superheroes, Todd. We cannot quit every time we lose someone. _He left the family._ That is unforgivable." 

Dick hears a heavy sigh from Jason. "You know, Dami... there was a time when I had left the family, too." 

"That was different. You had been killed." 

"I was messed up inside because of the Lazarus pit. Dick was messed up inside because he lost his best friend. How different is that, really?" 

"But you came back on your own accord. He was _forced_ to come back." 

Dick can practically see Jason running his hand through his hair, like he always does when he's trying to figure out how to turn thoughts into words. "First of all, I didn't really come back on my own accord. I was forced to come back, in a way, when Dick left. I had to come back to help, so in a roundabout way, it's thanks to Dick that I'm even a part of this family again." A long pause. "And secondly, I didn't force Dick to come back. I found him days before he actually came home. He's the one who made the choice to call me for help. I didn't make him. I _purposely_ didn't make him. I wanted it to be his choice to come back." 

Damian doesn't seem to have anything to say to that, so Jason continues. "Just give him a chance. That's all I ask. He is my big brother. My idol, if I'm being honest." Damian must be giving him a skeptical look, because he changes tactics. "He was the first Robin. He has been a solo vigilante for a long time. He led a team of vigilante covert ops fighters for years. Regardless of where he's been for the past year, he has a lot to offer by way of experience, you know. You could learn a lot from him." 

Dick can hear a put-upon sigh from the dramatic teenager. "...Very well, Todd. I will give him a chance." 

Dick doesn’t know how to feel about that conversation, so he turns around and sneaks back to his room. 

  
Dick had hidden out in his bedroom and had continued to try to do small body weight exercises and practice his breathing techniques throughout the day, all with about the same results. Tim brought up breakfast and lunch without saying a word to him. Jason must have been busy with Damian, because he only stopped by briefly to check on Dick. 

As much as he hates the self-pity game in theory, in actuality, he is beginning to feel sorry for himself. He had uprooted himself from his semi-comfortable lifestyle of debauchery, for this? Do they even appreciate how hard this has been for him?! 

As soon as the thought crosses his mind, he reprimands himself for being so petty. His psychiatrist had told him to get sober for himself, not for anyone else, so he couldn't rely on their approval. 

But... their support would be nice. 

_They wanted to help you, and you pushed them away,_ a part of his mind that sounds suspiciously like Tim reminds him. _You pushed them away, and then you literally ran away from them. There is no part of this that is their fault._

He promptly tells that part of his brain to fuck off. 

Continuing his self-pity streak, he internally laments that he also feels like an intruder in his own house. This Damian kid had arrived and took it over, and this kid clearly doesn’t approve of his presence in the home either. He feels almost afraid of leaving his room, for fear of running into him. He shouldn’t have to feel so _displaced_ in his own household. 

_You left,_ the unhelpful little part of his mind reminds him. _You left, and they had to move on. The world can’t stop for you just because you decided to run from your problems._ He reminds the voice that he had asked it to fuck off, and flops over on his stomach on his mattress. 

His internal ramblings keep him entertained for a couple more hours. By three o'clock though, he is restless from being holed up in his room all day. Agitation getting the best of him, he finally emerges from his room and makes his way up to the roof, carefully avoiding the house’s other inhabitants. 

As he sits in stillness, legs dangling from the roof’s edge, he stares off into the afternoon sky. It’s silent, save for a few chirps from the birds flying overhead. It’s almost peaceful. His head is always clearer from up high. 

Soon, however, the back of his neck prickles and he gets the distinct feeling that he’s being watched. 

A sigh escapes from between his pursed lips. When he speaks, he’s surprised at how bored he sounds. “Whoever you are, you can come out now. I know you’re there.” 

A shadow drops down from the chimney and lands almost silently beside him. 

“So. You’re Grayson.” 

Dick turns his head to see the same teenage boy from before, but in the unmistakable red, yellow and green costume complete with the white-lensed domino mask. Unsure how else to respond, he says simply, “Hello.” 

He can’t see the boy’s eyes, but he can see his scowl. “I don’t see what all the fuss was about. I pictured you bigger, by the way they all talked about you. You look like a wreck.” 

Ouch. He deserves that one, he supposes. “You must be the new Robin.” 

His scowl deepens. “And by the looks of it, the only one deserving of the title.” Even Dick is surprised by the laughter that bubbles up from his throat, and it seems to catch the boy off-guard, because his eyebrows lift in confusion. “May I ask what you find so funny?” 

“It’s just – you look exactly like Bruce when you frown,” he snickers. 

His scowl appears to ease up slightly. After a contemplative pause, he tactlessly changes the subject. “Are you going to be Nightwing again?” 

Dick doesn’t expect the sudden question, so he pauses long enough to give the boy a quick once-over as if it can help him puzzle him together. “Why?” 

“I’m Robin. Gotham’s protector. I need to know who else will be gallivanting around my city.” 

Dick hasn’t really thought about it since his return, but the answer comes easily to him. “Yeah, of course. Once I get back up to full strength, I am planning on resuming my mantle.” 

Damian’s lips thin. “Once you return, is Jason going to leave?” 

“What?” 

“The reason he came back is because of you, _Grayson_. I would hate to see our delicate ecosystem disrupted just because you decided to grace us with your presence again.” 

Delicate ecosystem? 

…Huh? 

_…Oh._ Oh, _that’s_ adorable. The kid’s attached to Jason. 

“I don’t think Jason is going anywhere, Damian. Not if I have anything to do with it, anyway.” 

The white lenses of his domino mask narrow at him. “You aren’t going to tell him to leave?” 

“No. I want him to stay.” 

“And… if he decides to leave against your wishes?” 

Aww. Dick wants to pinch the kid’s cheek, but he gets the distinct feeling that he’d probably lose a limb if he tried. “I’ll tell you what. If he leaves, I will personally find him and drag him back to Gotham, just like he did to me.” 

That seems to satisfy the boy, because he gives a terse nod. “Well, then. I wish you well on your return to full strength. I look forward to seeing the famed Nightwing in action soon.” With that, he jumps off the roof and disappears from Dick’s line of sight. 

…Huh. Weird kid. 

  
That night, Dick and Jason play oracle again. After a few hours of quiet back-and-forth through the comms, Dick asks him the question that had been burning in the back of his mind since his exchange with Damian. 

“The new kid said you came back because of me. Is that true?” 

Jason’s eyes don’t leave the bat-computer screen, but he responds steadily nonetheless. “The answer to that is… complicated. Honestly, I started coming around Gotham more often before you even left. Right after you left the team. Your fall from grace became somewhat of a subject of gossip amongst Gotham’s underbelly.” 

Dick suppresses a flinch. So, it had been obvious to the point of even the crime lords and villains in their city noticing? Great. Yet another thing to add to his list of reasons to be ashamed of himself. “I remember you following me a lot on patrol, but what made you come back after I left?” 

Jason purses his lips. “My sources started saying that you were acting like Bruce did after… after he lost me.” His voice grew quiet. “I didn’t know, Dick. I didn’t know he reacted that badly. But when I saw you, I understood. I finally got it. I understood that I was never disposable to Bruce. I started breaking into the bat-cave when I knew Bruce would be home, and I used the excuse that Nightwing hadn’t been sighted in two weeks and I wanted to see what had happened. Bruce told me that you ran away.” He takes a big breath and turns towards Dick for the first time since the conversation started. 

“And then, I ran into Tim. For the first time, we actually _talked_. He told me about Bruce and how he got violent and sloppy after my death. He told me about what it was like to watch him slowly lose himself. He said that’s why he became Robin in the first place – because Bruce needs a Robin to ground him.” 

Dick is speechless, and Jason continues. “I kinda realized that… Tim’s goal was never to replace me. Not in the way I thought he wanted to, anyway. We’re actually really close now, Tim and I.” Jason chuckles. “Did you know that he actually looked up to me when I was Robin? Like… I was his _hero_.” Dick smiles gently and nods. “Nobody had ever really… looked up to me before, you know? So I decided that I wanted to do better.” He runs a hand through his hair. “I started making up excuses to come around. Needing to use Bruce’s lab in the bat-cave, wanting to borrow equipment. I just… needed to make sure Bruce was okay. He probably saw right through my excuses, but he allowed it regardless. I ended up coming around more and more often and then after a while I was just here all the time. I kinda accidentally moved back in.” He shrugged with a shy smile. “I didn’t expect it, but I just went with it. Alfred was happy I was back. So was Tim.” 

“So… do you and Bruce get along any better now?” 

“Depends on the day. I still use guns and I won’t hesitate to blow the kneecaps off of any drug dealer stupid enough to sell drugs to minors. I won’t hesitate to kill child molesters either. Bruce and I still get into it sometimes, but… it feels like home here again.” Jason smiles. “So, yeah. To answer your question, I came back because of you.” 

Dick is speechless, and it takes him a few minutes to respond. When he finally does, his mind drifts to Damian. “You know, Damian is worried that you are going to leave now that I’m back.” 

Jason’s smile widens. “The kid’s attached to me. It’s cute. He’s had a rough go of it, you know.” 

“Yeah. I’ve gathered. It’s part of being a Robin, I guess. Tragic back story and all that.” 

They are interrupted by the comm system as Bruce asks Jason for coordinates of a convenience store. Jason types on the computer and then rattles them off and the comm system falls silent again. 

“So, what _is_ his back story? Dead parents or something?” 

Jason looks up from the computer, his expression blank. “You really don’t know?” 

“Know what?” 

“Dick, he’s… he’s Bruce’s. Not the way _we_ are, either – I mean, he _chose_ us. Damian was just kinda dropped on him. Damian… he’s biologically Bruce’s. He’s actually his kid. He’s fifteen, and Bruce just found out about him nine months ago. It was kind of chaos around here for a while after Bruce found out. Taking him in wasn’t exactly planned.” 

Dick is flabbergasted. “…Wow. Okay. So, who’s the mother? Some rich socialite?” 

Jason snickers. “If only it were that simple. No, nothing like that.” He takes in a deep breath. “Talia Al’Ghul is Damian’s mother. Ras is his grandfather.” 

Dick can’t even find words. “Wow.” 

“Yeah. He’s a total brat. I mean, like, a _complete_ asshole. But he grows on you.” 

Bruce’s voice came over the comm system again. Jason types a few more coordinates into the computer and sends instructions over to Bruce before turning back to Dick. “Yeah. Bruce was kind of a dick about it at first, too, and you know me – I have no problem calling people out on their bullshit. Damian went to sulk on the roof and I told Bruce exactly where he could stick his attitude. I ripped him a new one. Then I gave the kid my old costume and took him out on patrol. He’s got some murderous tendencies, but if anyone can deal with them, it’s me. He’s been patrolling with us almost every night for the past four months.” 

Overwhelmed with all of the information, Dick just shakes his head. “Jason, I… I don’t even know how to express how proud I am of you.” 

Jason freezes, clearly not expecting the compliment. Once he gets his mouth working again, he stammers, “Uh… what?” 

“You became everything I should have been. You stepped up. You were the family rock. Seriously, that’s a lot to deal with. First I leave, and then Bruce finds out about Damian, what – a couple months later? That’s… I mean, that’s impressive. You held it together. I’m not sure even _I_ could have done that even on my best days, had the circumstances been reversed.” 

Jason abruptly turns back towards the computer, swiveling his chair around, but not before Dick sees tears shining in his eyes. He discretely wipes them away and offers a hoarse, “Thanks, Dick.”


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's song: Heavy by Linkin Park and Kiiara. (Playlist can be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/kajnsn/playlist/796vN4CzQmr7lc3ugl1kQ3).)
> 
> Chapter warnings: Slight mental breakdown, mentions of sex work 
> 
> Now, make way for none other than the fabulous Black Canary.

The next day, he wakes up as the sun begins to shine through his window. 

The routine of being back in the manor is starting to feel familiar to him again. Wake up, eat breakfast, shower, work out a little. He makes his way down to the cave, taking the stairs two at a time, and prepares to work the bars and rings for the first time since he left. He begins to do basic pull-ups and turns on the rings, working up a sweat in an embarrassingly short amount of time, but he feels nonetheless exhilarated to be working on his acrobatics again. His strength is growing more and more every day. 

His routine is broken, however, when Bruce sticks his head through the cave’s door and asks Dick to come up to the living room. He quickly follows, wiping his forehead with a sweat rag and jogs up the stairs. When he emerges, Bruce nods towards the door. His fingers find the door handle and he gives it a rough squeeze to ground himself when he sees who it is. 

Dinah Lance stands in the entryway. 

Her presence is powerful and unmistakable. In that moment, she’s not Dinah Lance; she’s the Black fucking Canary. The woman before him is in her full combat boots, corseted, leather-studded glory. She’s no longer merely the woman – she’s the superhero, bigger than the sum of her parts. A symbol. He had seen her in action enough to know the difference. She is practiced and powerful, and has a way of slipping into a sort of reverie when she goes into battle. It’s a glint in her eyes that says she’s no longer Dinah, but the Black fucking Canary. 

But she pulls off her mask and her eyes are all ‘Dinah’. They are shining with tears and wide with disbelief. She takes a tentative step forward, as if she is afraid he will startle and run if she moves too fast. “Richard?” 

It reminds him so strongly of the first time they ever had a session together, nearly eight years ago, that he is sucked into the memory. 

_Dick was nervous as he sat down in the squishy seat in the corner of the small office room. He had never been in therapy before. Back in the circus, on the tougher days, he would talk to the bearded lady just to get things off his chest, and she was always good with giving advice. But he had a feeling that this time, it would be a little different._

_When the door to the small room opened and Bruce ushered in a tall, blonde woman, he found himself starstruck. “You’re… you’re the Black Canary,” he murmured breathlessly._

_She was taller than she had imagined, and even more beautiful than the pictures in the files that Bruce had relentlessly quizzed him with. He knew just about every superhero and villain across the globe, but nothing had prepared him for the idea that he would be meeting one of them that day._

_She just smiled kindly in response, and pulled off her mask. He hadn’t expected that, somehow – all of the pictures of her had been positively frightening – teeth bared as she opened her mouth in a piercing canary cry, pounding ruthlessly into the bad guys, or flying down the street on her motorcycle with her hair streaming behind her. But like this, standing casually in the doorway, in his house, mask off with a kind smile on her face? She seemed almost… human._

_She apparently wanted to be addressed as such, too, because when she opened her mouth to speak (Dick flinched, almost expecting a canary cry to knock him backwards), she said simply – in a normal voice – “Please, call me Dinah. And you must be Richard.”_

_He had responded, reflexively -_

“Call me Dick,” he murmurs, his eyes filling with tears at the memory. 

Something breaks within her, memories shining in her eyes to reflect Dick’s own, and she surges forward to envelop Dick in a hug. He gives the door handle one last rough squeeze before surging forward to meet her and throwing his arms around her. 

It’s nothing like the hugs he had been getting lately. From Bruce, Jason, even Tim, their embraces were all rough and strong, clasped tight with one arm around his shoulder. And while appreciated, this… this is nice. It’s different. It’s soft, like a mother’s hug. He finds himself crying and hugging her back, huffing in the achingly familiar scent of Mount Justice in her hair. He doesn’t even have time to question how she smells like a place that’s been destroyed, because she squeezes him tighter and murmurs, “I thought you were dead.” 

Dick chuckles in spite of the heaviness of her words. “It will take much more than a booze habit to take me out.” 

She squeezes him tighter, joining in on his laughter. “It’s good to see you, Dick.” 

Dick presses further into Dinah’s warmth, savoring the first bit of extended skin-on-skin contact that didn’t involve taking his pants off in over a year. “It’s good to see you too, Dinah.” 

“How have you been?” 

He gives the same answer that he gave to Clark and Roy. “I’ve been better.” 

She pulls back from their embrace slightly. “Bruce told me a little bit about what happened, but I’d rather hear it from you.” 

Dick mumbles unintelligibly into her hair, but he has no more fight left in him so he allows her to guide him to a recliner in the entryway. She settles into the chair next to him. Bruce had mysteriously disappeared, leaving the two of them to chat in private. 

“Talk. Keep talking. And don’t stop until you feel better.” 

A smile crosses his face and he can feel his walls falling unwittingly. Before he can even think of a way to sugarcoat it, he says, “I was a prostitute.” 

Dinah opens her mouth and closes it, then her jaw sets in a way that indicates that she definitely hadn’t known that part of the story going in. After a moment, “…Okay. And how has that affected you?” 

Defensiveness fills him, and even though he knows that Dinah would never judge, his next statement comes out a little harsher than intended. “Don’t judge sex workers. There’s nothing wrong with it. Honestly I don’t know why it’s not legalized and regulated.” 

Dinah reached out to put one hand on Dick’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, Dick. I didn’t mean to make you feel defensive. I am not judging you at all. It… it must have been horrible.” 

“Actually, it really wasn’t,” Dick confesses. “On the long list of things that I’ve done in my short life, that doesn’t even make the bottom fifty percent when ranked from least-shitty to most-shitty.” 

“Interesting,” Dinah replies, and she honestly sounds like she means it, so he continues. 

“It wasn’t a horrible experience in and of itself, honestly. I can see how it could easily get really terrible really fast if the right protections for sex workers aren’t in place, but…” he trails off and runs a hand through his hair. “Honestly, most of my clients were decent to me and the pay was good. If it weren’t for the umbrella of crippling depression and alcoholism over the whole thing, I might have actually enjoyed it.” 

“Hm.” 

Another pause, and Dinah seems to be doing that _thing_ that she does when she’s waiting you out to make you talk. 

It doesn’t take long. “I started drinking long before I left Gotham. Around the time I quit the team. A couple days ago was the first time I had spent an entire day sober in a year.” 

There is a comfortable pause and Dinah seems to be weighing things in her mind before she speaks again. “Tell me something, Dick. Why exactly did you leave Gotham in the first place?” 

Dick considers a lot of things in the contemplative pause that he takes before he speaks again. He had told Tim that he had left so he could fall apart, but was that really his reason? Maybe he left to get time away from everyone to mourn and process things. Is he better off, or worse, than when he left? Taking inventory of his lanky, weak limbs and the ever-present headache in his temple, he decided he’s most definitely worse off physically, at least. But what about mentally? Had he actually processed things the way he had intended to when he left those many months ago? Or had he merely masked it all with booze? 

As if reading his mind, Dinah asks, “Have you processed your grief over losing Wally?” 

It’s the first time he’s heard Wally’s name spoken out loud in over a year and it brings him vaulting back to the moment when he sprinted out of the Bioship onto the snow and saw the swirling vortex, the lightning striking the snow, and he heard Tim tell everyone that in a few moments Wally would – 

“Dick!” 

He pulls his head out of his hands and realizes that, somehow, he has slipped out of his chair and onto the floor and is now curled up in a tight ball with tears streaming down his face. 

Dinah kneels down next to him, pulling him back into her protective embrace, and Dick leans into the warmth of her body as his frame shakes with sobs. 

  
Grieving is a funny thing. 

Your mind works against you in so many ways. Desperate to escape the pain, your brain cooks up all sorts of what-if scenarios and backtracks everything to the point where it went wrong and instructs you how to prevent the disaster from happening. 

Don’t pull Artemis out of retirement and into this mission.  
Don’t let Wally back into the field.  
Don’t miss the twenty-first chrysalis.  
Don’t let Wally run to Antarctica.  
Don’t stand there and _do nothing_ while Wally disappears. 

It faintly reminds Dick of how, every time they watch a horror movie, Jason yells at the screen as if his warnings could prevent the death of the ditzy blonde character that they all _know_ is about to get axed. 

His mind is a fucking mess, skipping from memory to memory and daydream to daydream until he can’t remember what’s real and what’s not as he wallows through his regrets. 

In Metropolis, he had thought that he was working through his grief. 

Boy, was he wrong. He was only masking it. 

He hadn’t dealt with it – a point that Dinah had gently pointed out during their session. As if he needed to hear that after his panic attack. He _knows_. 

It’s like gravity pulling him back, over and over, when he tries to fly away from his problems. 

He just feels so heavy. 

  
“Roy is coming over again.” 

Dick raises his eyebrows over his cup of herbal tea. “Does he usually come over this often, or is it just a special little treat for the recovering alcoholic?” 

Even Dick is surprised at the amount of venom in his voice, and as he sees Jason recoil, he backpedals. “I – Sorry, I didn’t –” He starts again, “You know I love Roy. I like having him here. I’m sorry.” He sighs. “Withdrawals are making me bitchy. You didn’t deserve that.” 

Jason waves his hand dismissively. “I get that. We’ll forget it ever happened. And to answer your question…” A strange smile crosses his features – “It’s not exclusively about you.”’ 

Dick cocks an eyebrow, intrigued. “Oh?” 

“Roy and I have been hanging out a lot lately.” 

Dick smirks. “Are the two of you…” he allows his voice to trail off as he wiggles his eyebrows suggestively. 

“No,” Jason laughs. A thoughtful look crosses his face. “But I wouldn’t be opposed to it.” 

Dick smirks. “You should ask him out. He’s into guys, you know.” 

Jason cocks an eyebrow with a sly smirk. “I’m not really looking for a relationship right now, but I wouldn’t mind fucking around with him a little.” 

Dick hums in consideration. “So. Guys. You too, huh?” 

“Yup,” Jason replies, popping the ‘p’ sound. “At some point, someone’s going to have to break it to Bruce that none of his kids are straight.” 

Dick gapes. “Tim?” 

“Definitely queer.” 

“Wait - even the new one? Damian?” 

Jason smirks knowingly. “He hasn’t figured it out completely for himself yet, so don’t say anything, but… I’ve seen the way he looks at guys, and I’ve seen the way he _doesn’t_ look at girls. The kid’s definitely gay.” 

  
When Roy comes over later that night, they skip the small talk and get straight to the sparring. After such a painful therapy session that morning, he was eager to pull himself together with a familiar activity. 

They start out easy, just like before, but Roy seems to be eager to take his training to the next level. His punches and kicks barely miss Dick, and even though he knows Roy is _still_ not operating at full strength, he slowly gains the advantage in their fight. 

When Roy sends yet another swing, Dick lifts his foot to kick out at him, but the command seems to be leaving his brain at a sluggish rate because his limb is still close to the ground when he _should_ be striking Roy in the side. While this move would have taken him out a year ago, Roy easily twists out of the way of his knee and elbows him in the side. 

Dick feels the wind vacate his lungs in a harsh groaned exhale, and collapses. He asks his body to stand up, but it continues its trend of mutiny and he stays in a crumpled heap on the ground. 

Roy steps forward. “Dick?” He just grunts and waves him off, then carefully pushes himself upward, breathing heavily, and falls back into the ready position. 

They start again. 

They trade blows, over and over. Dick feels a spike of irritation go through him as he realizes that Roy is taking it easy on him. After Dick swings and misses for the third time in a row, Roy smirks. “You’re going to have to do better than that, Dickie.” 

Taunting. They used to do it to each other all the time, back when they would train together. 

A growl escapes his throat, and as he lunges forward, he knows that Roy isn’t doing anything wrong but his blood boils all the same. What did Black Canary used to call this? Displaced anger? A surprised look crosses Roy’s face as Dick roars at him and lunges again, swinging wildly at his lithe body. 

Suddenly, a fist connects with his shoulder from behind him. Dick teeters off balance and falls to the floor in an ungraceful heap, and with wild eyes, looks behind him. 

Jason. 

Jason steps forward, dismissing Roy with a wave and Roy gives him a nod before striding out of the bat-cave. 

Jason rounds on Dick. Anger flashes in his eyes. “You wanna fight for real? C’mon. Let’s go.” He swings at Dick, who blocks it and punches him in the shoulder. He knows Jason is letting him hit him and it pisses him off even more. He feels shame – he’s not as mentally or physically as strong as he used to be. He can feel the changes that had taken hold within his body and his mind over the last year. He’s an alien amongst people he considers family. Maybe Tim is right – maybe he _is_ weak, selfish, useless. Maybe he is causing more harm than good by coming back and making them all deal with him. 

His eyes fill with tears and he swings blindly at Jason’s blurry outline, then misses and falls forward, curling into himself on the floor. Weak whimpers leave his throat as he cries, and Jason rushes forward to hold him. 

“I don’t belong here,” Dick cries. “I’m only in the way. I’m a burden. You were doing so well without me, all of you, and I came here and fucked it all up.” 

“Shhhh. What’s really the matter?” 

Dick shakes in Jason’s arms. “I can’t sleep,” he groans. “I can’t sleep and when I do dream I have nightmares, and Tim is mad at me –” he chokes on a sob and the words continue to spill out like a waterfall – “Tim is mad at me and I deserve it, I left him, I left Bruce, I left _you_ , I run when I get scared, I don’t deserve to be a superhero, Jason, I –” 

Jason just holds him, rocking him gently as he sobs, shushing him quietly and communicating without words that he is loved and wanted and worth it. He holds his shaking body until the rhythm of his sobs slows and his breathing evens out.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's song: Hallelujah by Pentatonix (Playlist can be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/kajnsn/playlist/796vN4CzQmr7lc3ugl1kQ3).)
> 
> Chapter's warnings: Nightmares. Semi-graphic sex scene. Relapse.

That night, Dick dreams.

_In his dream, it was before Wally died. It was before the battle with the Reach had been won. It was before Mount Justice had blown up. It was before his and Wally’s relationship had disintegrated into bitter separation._

_Dick gets to the apartment and knocks on the door. The door creaks open and Dick steps inside, and his breath catches when Wally greets him with hard eyes and hands him a stack of hundred dollar bills._

_As if in slow motion, he hears himself ask, “What is this for?”_

_Wally gives him a scornful smile and tells him, “You’re a prostitute, aren’t you? This is how I have to see you nowadays, Dick. You’ve been so busy with the team that I have to **pay** for the pleasure of your company.”_

_He has nothing to say to that, so he mechanically follows Wally to the bedroom and Wally hands him the familiar green outfit – Artemis’s green archer outfit. Dick gives him a quizzical look and Wally gives him that same rueful smile. “You’re the one who called her back into the field to go help Kaldur. You’re the one who sent her away from me. It’s the least you could do.”_

_His cheeks burn in shame and his gaze falls to his feet, and when he looks up again, he realizes that he is in the costume and Wally is sneering down at him. “It always looked better on her. But since she’s not here, I’ll have to settle for **you**.”_

_Humiliation fills him and then all of a sudden he’s on his back on the bed and Wally is on him, biting at his neck and snarling in his ear, pushing Dick down against the mattress hard enough to leave bruises on his hips. “Is this what you did for them, hm? What you did for all of those men while you were pretending it was me?” and even though the situation feels wrong, so **wrong** , Dick can feel himself hardening against his own wishes and his cock starts straining at the green spandex of Artemis’s pants._

_“You’re a terrible leader,” Wally snarls as he rips a hole in Dick’s – Artemis’s – pants, “and a an even worse friend. How could you send her in there? How could you do that, knowing what she is to me?” and then Wally is penetrating him, as Dick had fantasized about happening a thousand times, except he had never imagined that he’d be filled with such shame, such confusion, but in spite of himself he feels his cock hardening even more. “Come on, Dick, I know you can do better than this! It’s like fucking a corpse; make some noise, move a little, would you? Don’t you do this for a living?!”_

_Dick begins to move his hips to meet Wally’s thrusts and he feels Wally hitting that spot inside of him over and over and he feels his orgasm approaching just a Wally starts chanting, “I hate you, I hate you, **I hate you, I hate you…"**_

Dick wakes up with a strangled scream and feels warm, sticky cum in his sweatpants. 

White hot self-hatred lights up in his veins and he feels a wave of revulsion crash over him. His stomach turns over and he stumbles out of bed into his en-suite bathroom and vomits into the sink. Gasping out, he raises his gaze to stare at himself in the mirror, taking in his appearance. His eyes are wide and his pupils are dilated in fear. Tears stream down his unshaven face and there’s vomit on his chin. 

His mind floats back to the dream and another surge of nausea hits him, and he bows forward over the sink again and dry-heaves. _Oh, god._

His pelvis presses up against the sink and he gags again as he feels the now-cold semen on the top of his thighs. Reaching blindly across the sink’s counter for the bar of soap to clean himself up, his hand bumps against the bottle of mouthwash perched on the edge of the sink. 

His world freezes for a moment as he looks up at it, his eyes darting directly to the alcohol content. 

In this moment, he wants to destroy himself. 

Without another thought, he picks up the bottle of mouthwash and gulps the bottle down in one breath. 

  
Bruce finds him ten minutes later, bowed over the toilet bowl and throwing up mint-flavored bile. He takes one look at the green regurgitation in the toilet and the empty bottle of mouthwash on the rim of the tub and his face falls. 

“Oh, Dick…” 

Dick looks at him out of the corner of his eye and breathes heavily, still bowed over the toilet. “Dick, what happened?” 

“Wally,” Dick manages to croak out, “It’s all my fault.” 

Bruce silently sits down next to Dick and pulls him against his warm body, brushing his hair out of his face and cradling him reassuringly. After a moment, he speaks. “You really loved him, didn’t you?” 

A weak sob left Dick’s throat. “You have no idea how much.” 

  
Wally is watching Dick sleep – he’s not a creep, _thank you very much_ he’s just bored - when he notices Dick start moaning and squirming. At first it’s barely noticeable; perhaps he’s just having a nightmare. But after a few minutes with his whimpering and writhing increasing in volume and frequency, Wally squints his eyes and regards Dick with interest. Is he… is he having a sex dream? 

Embarrassment and something slightly darker fill him in equal parts. The darker feeling wins out, and as he approaches Dick’s bed to get a better look at him – his hips are arching up slightly now and a bead of sweat is running down his face - he realizes that the other thing is _arousal._

He had seen Dick having sex with countless guys throughout his little stay in the speed force, of course, but he had felt only horror at the position that Dick had put himself in – the lifeless quality in his eyes, the dull expression on his face, his callous attitude towards the whole thing. 

But this? This is different. 

Wally squeezes his eyes shut against the realization, but it doesn’t stop the onslaught of feelings surging through him. _I want him._

He inhales deeply. _Shit._ He opens his eyes and immediately sees the obvious bulge in Dick’s sweatpants, and his mouth starts to water. _Shit, shit, shit!_

_I can’t believe that I am lusting after my best friend. From the afterlife. This is just… perfect. Just wonderful. Couldn’t be better._

His thoughts become muddled, however, as Dick’s pelvis begins to thrust in a steady rhythm and Wally sees his cock pulse underneath the thin layer of cotton. He licks his lips and swallows a lump in his throat, then takes a step closer, because Dick is muttering something now and he can _almost_ hear it. 

“Wally… oh god, _Wally…._ ” 

_Is Dick… having a sex dream… about **me**?_

Jaw falling open, Wally steps forward again and he is positively _throbbing_ at hearing the way Dick’s raspy voice calls out his name. He sounds so broken, so _beautiful._ He tentatively reaches towards his own cock. 

_I wonder if I can jack myself off from inside the speed force._

The thought is ripped from his mind, however, when Dick groans and jolts awake with a scream. 

Wally jumps backwards instinctively and watches Dick stumble from the bed to the bathroom, hesitantly following him, and as Wally crosses through the doorway into the en-suite he cries out _No!_ as he sees Dick reaching for the mouthwash and chugging it down. Surging forward, Wally tries to bat the bottle of green liquid away from his best friend but his hand uselessly floats right through the bottle. 

“Dick! STOP!” 

Oblivious to Wally’s shouting, Dick finishes the bottle and slumps against the bathtub, setting the now-empty bottle on its rim. He fists his hands into his hair and begins to cry. “I’m so sorry,” he sobs over and over. “I’m sorry, sorry, sorry…” 

Wally can only watch helplessly as Dick shakes and shivers, hiccupping out apologies and mumbling nonsensical words into his hands. After a few minutes, he abruptly sits up on his knees and bows forward to retch into the toilet. 

“Oh, Dick…” 

Wally turns and notices Bruce, standing in the doorway to the bathroom, taking in the scene with a look of horror painted across his face. “Dick, what happened?” 

Wally’s wide eyes take in Dick shivering again, then see him looking at Bruce out of the corner of his eye. “Wally… It’s all my fault.” 

Tears stream down Wally’s face as he kneels next to Dick’s shaking form, and he cries out, uselessly shouting into the void, “No, it’s not! It’s not your fault! I knew what I was doing when I did it, Dick, _I_ made the choice, you can't...!” 

Wally is so lost in his shouting that he almost misses Bruce speaking again, but he heard it – “You really loved him, didn’t you?” 

Nothing could prepare Wally for what comes next – he feels a roar in his ears and a surge in his heart as Dick whimpers, “You have no idea how much.” 

_He’s in love with me. Dick is in love with me._

_What the hell do I do now?_


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's song: Breaking the Habit by Linkin Park (Playlist can be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/kajnsn/playlist/796vN4CzQmr7lc3ugl1kQ3).)
> 
> Chapter warnings: Very, VERY mild self-harm (in the form of taking a hot shower) but it is quickly addressed as being unhealthy.

Dick wakes up the next morning, slow and groggy. 

Letting out a long sigh, he rubs his eyes. He had hardly slept after waking up from his nightmare about Wally and his relapse on mouthwash. 

Does it even count as a relapse? It was hardly even alcoholic, and he threw it up right away. It didn’t even have time to get into his system. He squeezes his eyes shut and forces down the wave of shame that rises up within him. _The intent was still the same. If I’d had alcohol in front of me, I would have drank it. That was a relapse. And now I have to deal with the consequences._

He drags himself out of bed and walks down the stairs, combing his fingers through his hair as he meanders down the hall. The smell of breakfast is wafting up from the kitchen and he picks up his pace eagerly. For the first time in recent memory, he actually feels hungry. 

He emerges into the kitchen and sees Alfred flipping pancakes on the state of the art griddle. He greets Dick with the usual cheerful formality and motions for him to have a seat at the table. 

It’s only after Alfred has served pancakes, scrambled eggs, sausage, and coffee to Dick that he sits down across from him, folds his hands delicately on the counter, and speaks. 

“Miss Lance will be coming in about an hour. I suggest you ready yourself.” 

Dick glances at the clock on the oven and gives Alfred a puzzled look. “Black Canary? It’s Wednesday, right? She’s not scheduled to be here until tomorrow.” 

Alfred purses his lips and gives Dick a _look_. “Given the events that transpired last night, I thought it wise to schedule an additional visit with her.” 

Ah. Alfred knew. 

Of course he did. Bruce may be the best detective in the world, but Alfred is the butler of the best detective in the world as well as butler to the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, so part of Alfred’s job description is to routinely outsmart Bruce. 

(It’s a trick to get him to eat or sleep when he’s working a case and is on a roll but he’s been awake for seventy-two hours straight, or to get him to drop his Batman work long enough to actually be the CEO of his company. Alfred has had to discretely drug Bruce’s coffee then drag him upstairs to his bed. He’s had to casually unplug the Batcave’s wireless router and hand Bruce his formal tux with a “Well, Master Bruce, as long as it seems that you have reached a natural stopping point, you should put this on. You should really make an appearance at the gala, considering it is presently happening two floors above you. It would be rather difficult to explain your absence in your own house to the press tomorrow, wouldn’t you say?”) 

Outsmarting Batman and his various Batlings is part of the job description. So, yes. Of course Alfred knew. 

The daunting task of sharing his mistake with one of his mentors carried him back upstairs and into a hot shower. He turns the knob all the way to the left, and soon, steam billows out from his open bathroom door. He steps under the water and his skin stings from the heat, but he forces himself to endure it as if the scalding water can wash away the shame of his mistakes. 

Then, when he feels as if he can’t take it anymore, he turns the knob all the way to the right and is soon blasted with frigid water. He endures this too, telling himself that it’s his punishment for his moment of weakness. 

And finally, when his scalded red skin had faded to pale under the cold spray, he steps out of the shower and towels himself off, scrubbing his skin red all over again. 

Admittedly, he feels better, but only marginally. He figures it’s mostly just because he has allowed himself a moment of self-pity after “punishing” himself. He shakes it off and internally scolds himself, feeling a new wave of guilt wash over him. _I’m better than this. I can own up to my mistakes without engaging in self-harm or self-pity. I’ve always been good with self-awareness. I need to put that into practice with Canary, and then maybe I can move forward from this setback._

  
Dick finishes dressing himself, puts on deodorant, and even sweeps some gel through his hair. _No more self-pity_ , he thinks as he leaves his room. The doorbell rings as he descends across the last step into the foyer. 

“Come on in, Miss Lance. We appreciate that you can make it on such short notice,” Alfred greets with a polite smile as he ushers her into the threshold. 

“Thank-you, Alfred.” Dinah turns to aim a pointedly soft smile at Dick. “I heard you had an eventful evening. Shall we talk in Bruce’s study?” 

Pushing down the renewed surge of shame, he leads the way through the hallways and into the small alcove that functions as Bruce’s office. Dick settles in on the squishiest couch, and Dinah sits in the high-backed chair across from him. “So. Do you want to talk about it?” 

Dick snorts. “No,” he answers, “But I know I need to.” 

Dinah smiles kindly at his candid reply. “That shows a fair amount of maturity, Dick. You’ve always been good at handling your emotions yourself, but I’m glad you are willing to open up to me as well.” 

“Yeah,” he sighs. 

And then, silence. Dick notes with amused irritation that Black Canary is doing that _thing_ again where she waits you out to make you spill your guts. As if he doesn’t see through it by now. 

But it works nonetheless. “I… relapsed last night. As I’m sure you know.” 

“Yes.” 

Dick huffs. It’s not a question; just a statement. She’s waiting him out again. Damn her and her psychotherapy. “Yeah. I drank a bottle of mouthwash.” He waits for Dinah’s horrified reaction, and when he doesn’t get one, he continues. “It didn’t have high alcohol content and I threw it up right away, so I don’t think any of the alcohol even got in my system, but… I decided I’m counting it as a relapse, because if I had liquor in front of me, I would have drank it.” He takes a big breath. “And… I won’t be able to avoid liquor forever. At some point I will have to walk through the grocery store and pass the liquor aisle or walk downtown past a bar. I want to get to the point where it can be there in front of me, and I still won’t reach for it.” 

Dick doesn’t miss Dinah’s proud smile. “A very worthy goal.” 

He raises and then lowers his eyebrows in a distinctly unimpressed manner. “Don’t be too proud of me yet. I’m still stumbling my way through this. I kinda… punished myself… by taking a really hot shower. But then I realized that it was stupid and that all I was doing was wallowing in self-pity.” 

“Everyone has different ways of coping, Dick,” Dinah says softly. “But self-harm is never the only option available, or anywhere near the best option available. It’s normal and completely okay to have moments of weakness. You don’t need to punish yourself, you just need to learn something from it. And you said it yourself – you are stumbling through it. Sometimes, that’s the only thing you can do.” 

Without giving it much thought, Dick finds himself falling into his old habit of opening up to her. “I have been doing nothing but engaging in acts of self-destruction for the past year,” he confesses. “The drinking, sex without using protection… I even tried cocaine once,” he admits, and flinches slightly when he sees Dinah’s sharp look. “Don’t worry. I hated it. It was… not a good experience,” he finishes lamely. 

Dinah seems to be pausing to gather her thoughts for a minute, and when she finally speaks, Dick is floored. “Self-destruction is a normal reaction to guilt and self-hatred, Dick. It served a purpose for you. All maladaptive behavior is there because it serves a purpose. It helped you survive. But the goal isn’t just to survive – it’s to thrive, and in order to do that, you need to let go of the guilt. There are better ways of getting through tough times than hurting yourself in new areas to manage the original source of your pain. We will work through them together.” 

“I… I guess I didn’t realize I how much guilt I have been harboring,” Dick concedes. 

“Guilt is normal, even _helpful_. Guilt can force you to think about how to do better next time when you mess up. But what _isn’t_ helpful is wallowing in it.” 

Dick nods slowly, and they fall into companionable quiet as he processes his thoughts in silence. “So… what now?” 

Dinah smiles, and Dick knows what she’s about to say before she even opens her mouth. “What do _you_ think is the next step?” 

He rolls his eyes and grins in spite of himself. “Knew you’d say that. I guess… Roy said something about making ‘a plan’.” 

“A safety plan, yes. That would be a good start.” 

Dick waves his hand dismissively. “Sure, one of those. How do I get one?” 

Dinah lets out a huff of amused laughter at his phrasing. “The first step is to identify what the trigger was. And then, you make a plan of what you will do next time you come up against that trigger.” 

Dick bites his lower lip. “And… what do I do?” 

Dinah shrugs. “Whatever works. Without causing harm to yourself or others, anyway. Hit a punching bag. Call someone to vent. Physically remove yourself from the situation. Write a letter, even if you never send it. The more you practice, the better at it you will get. You just need to find what works for you, and slowly work up to immersing yourself in the real world from there.” She gives him a pointed look. “You can’t stay locked up in the manor forever, you know.” 

Dick sighs heavily. “I know.” 

  
Dick leaves his session with Dinah feeling only marginally better than he had felt when she first arrived. After being so raw and open, he feels drained and wrung-out, like a wet towel squeezed and twisted to rid it of its moisture. 

He walks her to the door and, after a brief hug, bids her goodbye. Then, he wanders towards the kitchen to find something to eat. 

He stops short in the doorway of the dining room, because the scene laid out in front of him is peaceful in a way things rarely are in his life. 

Jason sits next to Bruce at the head of the table, bowed over a laptop screen, softly conversing with him about a case. The details drift over Dick’s ears, as his focus is on their gentle expressions. He had never seen them like this with each other. 

Damian, walking over from the kitchen with a steaming mug in his hand, contributes a few words here and there in his usual terse tone until he settles in the chair opposite Jason, and pulls the laptop screen towards himself and away from the other vigilante. Dick almost expects Jason to respond in kind – to pull the screen back, or to aim a swift kick at Damian’s shin – but instead, he just grins and ruffles the youngest boy’s hair in a manner that screams fond familiarity. Then he looks up, and Dick follows his gaze across the dining room where Tim is emerging from the kitchen with two cups of coffee in hand. The two wear matching soft smiles, and Tim ducks his head slightly to peer over at Jason from under his eyelashes once he reaches the table and sits down. 

“Just like you like it,” he says. 

Jason winks, and it earns him a blush from the other man. “Thanks, baby bird.” 

“I’m only a few months younger than you.” 

"And still half a head shorter.” 

Tim pouts visibly, but he has a gleam in his eye that tells that it’s all merely a part of their usual banter. “And I could still kick your ass,” he says through a sip of his coffee. 

Dick looks from the small smile crinkles under Tim’s eyes to the uncharacteristically soft smile on Jason’s face, from Damian’s sure posture to the contented expression smoothing out Bruce’s features, making him look years younger… and he wonders where he fits into this picture. 

He spends the rest of the afternoon in his room, contemplating his place in the family. 

  
That evening when Tim brings him his medication, he hangs his head miserably and leans against his bed post. “I shouldn’t be here.” 

Tim looks up from his task of organizing the pill bottles and sighs. “What are you talking about?” 

“The only reason Jason found himself is because I was gone. The four of you – you, Jason, Bruce, Damian – you have developed a beautiful ecosystem. Then I come back in and disrupt that. I shouldn’t be here, I…” he suppresses a shaky sob. “I can find somewhere else to go. I can… I can go back to Metropolis. Or live at Mount Justice. I just… I shouldn’t be here. I don’t want to get in the way.” 

Tim blinks at him. “Dick, we _want_ you here. Bruce and Jason both do. I do. Hell, even Damian has developed a liking for you, and he doesn’t like _anyone_.” 

Dick looks unconvinced and slumps over even further. Tim sighs and sits down on the bed next to him. 

“You say we have a good ecosystem here? Well, it wasn’t always that way. When you left, it left the family in shambles.” Tim seems to steel himself for a second. “It broke us for a while, Dick. I had to scramble to make up for you being gone. I had to hold Bruce together, and hold our operation in Gotham together, not to mention Wayne Enterprises, and you have _no idea_ how hard that was. I was working at Wayne Enterprises full-time during the day, and patrolling every night.” A wry glare crosses Tim’s face. “You know why Jason finally came back? It’s because he found me passed out in an alleyway during patrol after staying up for a week straight and I was bleeding out after getting beaten up by a couple of thugs. It wasn’t you that really brought Jason back. It was me, almost dying.” 

Dick gulps down a shaky breath. Jason had mentioned that he ‘ran into Tim’, but he had failed to include the tidbit that running into him meant rescuing him from near-certain death. He’s not really sure what to say to that. Luckily, Tim doesn’t wait for him to figure it out; he continues on with his rant. 

Tim glares into Dick’s eyes. “All of this? It’s bigger than just you. And I expected you, _of all people_ , to understand that. And here you are, talking about leaving. Just like you did before. It almost broke us, Dick. But you know what? We adapted and we survived. I took over Wayne Enterprises while Bruce ran the nighttime operation, and Jason became his second-in-command. Alfred and I traded off as Oracle. When Damian came into the picture, we had to adapt yet again.” He runs a hand through his hair and his voice becomes quiet. “He was a terror. He’d _killed people_. Not even in rage like Jason; he did it in cold blood. He’s been killing since he was _three_ , Dick.” Tim shakes his head slowly. “It took Bruce’s full attention to corral him in. To train the killing instinct out of him. We couldn’t let that loose in Gotham, so Jason and I took over the nighttime operation and Alfred ran Wayne Enterprises and was Oracle when necessary. We made it work. We adapted and changed each time it became necessary, and we all got closer because of it.” 

They are both quiet for a long moment, each lost in thought; Dick wallowing in guilt and Tim weighed down by the past few months. Finally, Tim speaks again. “I guess what I’m saying is, ecosystems change. It changed when you left. It changed again when Damian came into the picture. And it’s changing again now. Sure, it’s been hard, but change isn’t always a bad thing. We _want_ you here, Dick. Even if you think there’s no space for you here, we’ll make room. You’re one of us.” He smiles gently. “Whether you want to be or not, you’re one of us.” 

Dick smiles shakily at his lame attempt at a joke, but his eyes fill with tears and he throws his arms around Tim. His whole body shakes with sobs. “I am so, _so_ fucking sorry, Tim… Please forgive me. I’ll never run from the family again.” 

Tim shushes him and murmurs reassurances into his ear while petting his back until Dick falls asleep against him.


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's song: Hurricane by Halsey (Playlist can be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/kajnsn/playlist/796vN4CzQmr7lc3ugl1kQ3).)
> 
> Chapter warnings: Mild smut scene.
> 
> Hurricane by Halsey was the inspiration for the italicized scene in the middle of the chapter. I was doing the shuffle playlist writing challenge, Hurricane came up, and I wrote that scene. I decided to include it here as a bit of backstory about Dick discovering his sexuality, as I thought that it fit in well.

The next morning, Dick is practicing on the trapeze bars and rings when Damian walks in. Dick is listening to music with headphones in his ears, nodding along to the songs as he swings back and forth. Damian silently watches him from the shadows. When Dick realizes he’s got company, he takes the headphones out and waves him over. 

Damian eyes him with uncertainty, and approaches the base of the high bars. “What are you doing?” 

“Acrobatics,” he says, his voice slightly strained as he vaults backwards to catch another trapeze bar and swings himself over it. “It’s my _thing_. It’s how I became Robin.” 

“What do you mean?” 

Dick grunts with the effort of pulling himself back up – his muscles are far from where they used to be; they burn unpleasantly with each movement – and ultimately drops down onto the ground a few feet below him with an unsatisfied frown at himself. “Every one of us Robins had our own strengths coming into it. Jason was a street fighter. Tim’s the best detective I’ve ever met; even better than Bruce, if we’re being honest. And you were trained by the League of Assassins. We all had our thing. Acrobatics was mine.” Damian’s lips are pursed as he stares at the equipment with uncertainty, and Dick cocks his head to the side. “Do you… want me to teach you?” 

He appears hesitant but gives a terse nod. “If you believe it would serve me well in the field, then yes. This is… admittedly not something that I was exposed to under my grandfather’s training, as thorough as it was.” 

“Come on, then,” Dick grins. “Get up there.” 

Damian regards him contemplatively for a moment before he climbs his way up to the trapeze bar and hangs down from it, looking expectantly at Dick. 

“Okay. The first thing you want to do is swing your body back and forth. It’s like swinging on the grappling line, except you use two hands instead of one.” 

Damian nods tersely and begins to swing his body back and forth until he builds up a good momentum, then Dick says, “Okay, now - on the upswing, jump from that bar to the next one.” He does, then looks expectantly at Dick. “On the next upswing, reverse your direction by flipping one hand’s position and then the other.” 

He executes it flawlessly, and a smug smile crosses his face. Dick teaches him a few flips and tricks, increasing in difficulty, and Damian completes all of them – not perfectly, but much better than any ordinary beginner. 

“Excellent job, Damian. You catch on quickly.” 

Damian’s smug smile relaxed into a genuine one before being replaced once again by his haughty demeanor. “Well of course; I’m the son of Batman and grandson to Ras Al’Ghul. I would expect no less of myself.” 

But all the same, Dick can see that he’s absolutely glowing from the praise. He probably didn’t get many compliments from Ras, and unless Bruce’s personality had done a complete 180 over the past year, he probably wasn’t getting many from Bruce either. Dick makes a mental note to have a word with him about that. 

It’s nice, bonding with his… youngest brother. That’s an odd thought – another brother. It brings a slight ache to his chest. Dick had never had siblings in his family of origin, and he never expected to have siblings when Bruce took him in. And then Jason happened, then Tim. And now Damian. This kid is his family to him, he realizes in that moment, just as much as Jason and Tim are. He wants to get to know this kid a little better. 

“Is this something that you’d like to keep working on, Damian? I’d be happy to teach you, in exchange for some pointers on using those katanas that you seem to favor.” 

Dick never intends to actually use katanas in the field, but having the kid teach him within his comfort zone might be nice. And besides, Damian strikes him as the type who doesn’t like to look the fool. Asking for help in return might persuade him to allow Dick to tutor him a bit. 

Much to Dick’s pleasure, it works. Damian’s eyes light up at the prospect of teaching the elder something he doesn’t already know. “That would be agreeable.” 

Soon, a routine is agreed upon. Every Thursday morning for two hours, Damian will practice acrobatics with Dick and then Dick will teach him to fight with katanas for an hour before he heads up to his room to do schoolwork with Alfred, and then Dick heads to the study for his therapy appointment with Black Canary. 

  
“Tell me, Dick – how did your experience in Metropolis change the way you think about sex?” 

Dick chews on his bottom lip. “I’m honestly not sure. I haven’t really had the urge to have sex since then. Since months before I left, really. It kind of killed my sex drive.” He looks up at Dinah’s understanding expression. “Is that weird?” 

“Not at all. It’s normal to develop a gag reflex for it if you had to force yourself to perform acts that you didn’t necessarily want to perform.” 

“I suppose,” he concedes. 

“If you don’t mind me asking – are you even attracted to men?” 

“Oh, definitely, yes.” 

“Had you had relations with men before this?” 

“Yeah. Nothing serious. Just –” _one night stands_ , he finishes silently. “Just casual flings. I didn’t have time for anything serious.” 

“Does the team know?” 

“No.” 

Dick had never told the team about his trysts with men. There was never really anything to tell. They were meaningless. Hormone-fueled. They were only ever meant to sate his desire for flesh-on-flesh and an orgasm. Fucking or getting fucked. Losing himself in the musk of another man, the lean muscles, the panting and moaning and sweat. He had a type – redheads and runners. 

So, no. The team didn’t know. Bruce probably did, though. Knowing everything is kind of his thing. 

Even before Wally died, he’d had several one-night stands with men. His mind swarms with memories that he hadn’t tapped into in years. 

_Dick remembers grinning as he felt strong hands push him up against the wall, slipping under his shirt to grasp at bare skin. He tilted his head back to enjoy the sensation of the other man’s mouth on his neck, eyelids fluttering, savoring the feeling of the hot, wet tongue against his skin._

_It was moments like these that he told himself that he doesn’t belong to any city. Not Gotham, not Bludhaven, not anywhere – he was his own man. He wasn’t tied down anywhere. He could do whatever he wanted._

_Of course once his high faded, his thoughts would return to their usual tepid and logical stance. But now, with nimble fingers grasping at the button on his jeans and pressed so hard against the brick that he could feel the indentions between each block, he could forget, just for a moment, that his life wasn’t entirely his own._

_In moments like these, he could forget that there were larger forces at work; things that he had to make sacrifices for. Things he had to be selfless for. Things he had to give up wonderful moments like **this** for. _

_He allowed himself to feel selfish, even just for an hour, to grasp and claim another human being when he otherwise couldn’t. Because claiming someone meant being claimed in return, and that simply wasn’t an option. His life wasn’t his own. His life belonged to each citizen of Gotham, each citizen of Bludhaven and really, each living being on the planet. He was prepared to forfeit his life at the very moment it was demanded. That is what it means to be a superhero._

_But just for a few hours, he allowed himself to feel like a wanderer, an adventurer, when he allowed the man to worship his body. He allowed himself to grasp at pleasure and chase the high that came with heavy petting, with grinding, with the sweet friction, with the taboo of making out in a dark alley in a dangerous city._

_He allowed himself these small pleasure, because he knew that soon, he would be called back to being a superhero._

Snapping him out of his reverie, Dinah gently places a hand on his arm. “Care to share what’s going through your head?” 

He bites his lip. “Just… remembering some of my first experiences with men.” 

“Did any of those experiences result in anything more than a physical relationship?” 

“No,” Dick murmurs. “It’s not that I’m against it; I would date a man if I found someone I was genuinely interested in. It’s just…” His gaze falls to the floor. “My heart has just been elsewhere, I guess.” 

Dinah doesn’t ask, so Dick doesn’t elaborate. He assumes she’s going to do the wait-him-out thing again, but instead, she steers the conversation elsewhere. “How have you been coping with everything lately? Have you given any thought to your safety plan?” 

Dick bowed his head slightly. “Yeah. I… I made a list of people I can talk to if I feel the need to drink. And I’ve been practicing breathing exercises.” 

“And while that’s a good start, your plan needs to be a little more detailed than that. We need a step-by-step plan.” 

Dick takes in a big breath and lets it back out again. “Okay. So… my first step if I feel the urge to drink is to practice my breathing exercises. Then I will try to remove myself from the situation, like leaving the room. Then if that fails, I can call Bruce, Jason or Roy and they will kick my ass.” 

Dinah smiles. “Metaphorically, I hope.” 

“You never know with Jason and Roy,” he chuckles. “We’ve been sparring quite a bit lately and it’s been leaving me black and blue.” 

“You’ll match your costume, then.” 

Dick chuckles. “Yeah.” 

Her face appears thoughtful for a moment. “Are you planning on donning your cowl in the future?” 

“Eventually.” 

“You don’t need to make a decision now – it’s still early – but what do you think you need to do in order to feel ready to become Nightwing again?” 

Dick hums in consideration. “I will need to get back in shape, obviously; I couldn’t even keep up with a patrol on a slow night right now. I have to get to the point where my family trusts me enough to be out of the house.” He smiles sardonically. “I will definitely have to work through my addiction a little better. At some point, I will have to infiltrate a bar or I will come across a drunk person and it might trigger the desire to relapse. I need to be able to fight that.” 

“Wise,” Dinah murmurs. “Anything else?” 

Dick’s mind immediately goes to the last time he was on a team mission. When Wally disappeared before his eyes. “I need to… work through the trauma of… losing a teammate.” 

Dinah’s eyebrows rise ever so slightly. “That’s the first time you’ve brought him up, Dick. I know how much he meant to you. I’ve been allowing you space to bring it up on your own. I’m proud of you for being able to do it.” 

“Thanks.” 

Her words feel empty, though, and it must show on his face because Dinah smiles sympathetically at him. “Do you want to talk about it?” 

“No,” he answers immediately, then hesitates. “At least… not yet. Not now. I need to… I need to…” he isn’t even sure how he planned to end that sentence when he started it. “I just… I’m not ready to talk about him yet.” 

“It was hard on all of us, Dick,” she says softly. “Just know that I, and the entire rest of the League, are here for you. It’s obvious that you haven’t yet dealt with the pain of losing your best friend, and when you are ready to deal with it, we’re here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realized I forgot to add the chapter warnings and chapter songs for the last three chapters so I just added them, so look back and check out the songs! Chapter 16 is particularly heartbreaking when read while listening to Hallelujah, so if you want to cry, have at it.


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's song: Boys in the Street by Seeb and Greg Holden (Playlist can be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/kajnsn/playlist/796vN4CzQmr7lc3ugl1kQ3).)
> 
> Chapter warnings: internalized homophobia, memory suppression, implied/referenced child abuse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprise, bitch - I bet you thought you'd seen the last of me.

Wally visits his parents for the first time since his disappearance. 

Standing outside that house immerses him in a thick mire of memories. Few of them are pleasant. He shakes his head as if to clear the muck of sadness that settles over him and walks through the front door. 

(He doesn't think he will ever get used to being able to phase through walls like a ghost, no matter how many times he does it.) 

He visits his mother first. She's in the bedroom, crying, eyes red and puffy with dark circles underneath them. Part of him wants to find a way to comfort her. He was still protective of his parents, and no matter how much hell they had caused him, he would always look out for them - he had left words of love for them with Barry that day in Antarctica, after all. But even if he could reach out to take his mother's hand in that moment to relieve her pain, he doesn't think he would. The healthy emotional distance he had created between them hadn't faded, not even in death. 

Solemn now, he wanders into the kitchen. His dad is crouched over the kitchen table, flipping through a photo album. His face is grave and wrinkled. The lines on his face seem even deeper, more pronounced, than they were when he saw him last. He stares down at a page in the photo album. 

Upon maneuvering to a place where he can easily see the page's contents, he feels himself frown. The photo to the left is of himself and his best friend from elementary school at age nine - the best friend he had before he became a superhero and met Dick. His name was Daniel. The photo right beside it is of himself, around the same age as the other photo but just a little older. He has a black eye, his father's arm wrapped around him and his mother holding onto his dad's other arm with an adoring smile. 

His father had told him to tell the school that he got the black eye from falling down on the playground. For the longest time, he had tricked himself into believing it too. But that's not what happened 

Wally feels sick as the memories flood back to him and play behind his eyelids like a movie. 

In his room, age ten, playing with Daniel. They play with legos, building rocket ships and police cars and construction sites. Daniel looks over to him and scoots closer, fluttering his eyelashes, and Wally remembers thinking just how pretty he is. Daniel leans over their newly constructed play scene and brushes his lips against Wally's. It's chaste and simple. 

But it's his very first kiss. 

He is floored at the realization. Artemis wasn't his first kiss. Daniel was. 

Then he remembers looking over at the creaking doorway and seeing his father standing there, face frozen in fury. His father quietly tells Daniel to leave, and he does without a word. 

Then, all he remembers is pain and white hot anger pouring out of his father. 

The photo in front of Wally, of his younger self with a black eye, was taken two days later. 

And he hits a brick wall in his mind. More memories flood him now that the floodgates is his subconscious are open - memories he had long since squashed down into submission until they were practically nothing. 

Memories from when he was older. Memories from his time on the team. Memories of Dick, and of all the things he hadn't let himself feel. 

Staring into Dick's eyes for the first time when he revealed his secret identity and being floored at how pretty they were. 

Watching Dick's body move in his spandex suit after he became Nightwing and his posterior was no longer blocked by a cape, and swallowing a lump in his throat. 

Sitting far too close to Dick on the couch at Mount Justice while playing video games and praying Dick didn't notice their thighs pressed together, because sitting flush up against Dick just made him feel so _alive_. 

Getting too drunk with the team one night and leaning close to Dick, close enough to feel his breath on his face, close enough to kiss him, and then pulling back at the last minute and flopping over sideways to the other end of the couch, convincing himself that it had never happened. 

The memories roar into his mind, tearing apart everything he had ever thought of himself, causing such a cognitive dissonance within him that he doubled over onto the kitchen floor. 

_I can't believe I forced myself to forget everything, all of it, all of my feelings..._

Black Canary had definitely hit the nail on the head when she told him he's in denial. She just didn't know how deep in denial he really was. To her credit, neither had he. He had pushed it all down, far away, to avoid his father's disapproval. 

Now that he's dead, his dad's - or anyone's - disapproval seems like a stupid reason for holding back on something that would have made him so happy. 

And now, it's too late. He doesn't even have the chance to try. 

  
Over the next few weeks, Dick develops a comforting routine – he meets with his psychiatrist during the day on Mondays then spends a couple hours lifting, gets intensive training from Jason and Bruce during the day on Tuesdays, and lifts some more on Wednesdays, followed by family bonding time (mandated by Jason). Thursday mornings, he trains Damian in acrobatics – the younger teen picks it up quickly, which doesn’t surprise him. Damian teaches him a few things about fighting with katanas, but it usually just devolves into the two of them play-wrestling on the mats of the Batcave floor. Then he sometimes helps Damian with his school work to give Alfred a break before his appointment with Dinah. On Fridays, he lifts weights and frequently goes on runs with Jason. It’s good to get out of the house and see Gotham again, even if it’s just during the daylight, and Roy frequently joins them. 

The schedule helps him stay sane. He still gets the urge to drink from time to time, but not as much as he used to. He learns to ignore it and busy himself with something else instead. The weeks pass by and between the running, weight lifting, training and acrobatics practice, Dick’s body gains definition and becomes harder and stronger. His mind grows clearer. He feels more mentally stable. 

But he still hasn’t talked any more about Wally. It still feels too soon for him. Nonetheless, Wally continues to haunt his thoughts. 

  
That evening, it rains. 

Dick sits on the roof, knees pulled up to his chest, forehead resting on his kneecap. Water drips down from the crown of his head, streaming down his face. He doesn’t bother wiping the cold raindrops away from his face, because it feels good in contrast to the hot tears spilling from his eyes. 

The droplets feel soothing against his body, even as he shivers from exposure. The shaking of his shivering body feels comforting, in a very animalistic way. He’d heard once that animals vibrate their bodies in response to trauma in order to comfort themselves and shake off the negative feelings. It feels much the same for him. 

Besides, Dick can handle a little physical discomfort. He can even handle the emotional anguish, the crying until his eyes sting, the nightmares that have begun to haunt him night after night. 

But what hurts the most is not knowing what could have been. 

He had been so close with Wally once. They could have been close again. 

But what kills him, what absolutely _kills_ him, is that Wally never knew why he had pushed him away. 

Wally didn’t know, before he died, that everything he had done, he had done because he had loved him. 

Even saying it in his head sounded incredibly lame, now that he thinks about it. Pushing him away because he loves him? What is he, a preteen all over again? He likes to think that he’s more mature than that. 

He frequently thinks about what could have been. Very frequently. He thinks about it when his thoughts drift during the day, and he dreams about it every night. He imagines himself running his fingers through silky red hair, touching pale freckled skin, pressing his mouth to Wally’s soft lips. But then he wakes up, whether literally or metaphorically, and it hurts. It hurts so fucking bad. 

It almost breaks him. 

Now that he’s finally admitted his feelings to himself, now that he’s finally sober… his mind goes into overdrive, seemingly making up for the past several months of being switched off. He imagines every possibility, every what-if scenario. 

If only he hadn’t allowed Wally back into the field. 

If only he hadn’t asked Artemis to be a part of the mission. He could have easily sent M’Gann instead; she could have shapeshifted into anyone. 

If Wally was still alive… 

Maybe they would have a chance at being together. 

Maybe Wally would leave Artemis. 

Maybe Wally would realize the depth of his feelings for Dick once he leaves her. 

Maybe they could get together. Maybe Dick would confess his feelings for Wally. Or maybe Wally would beat him to it. Then they’d kiss, and hug, and everything would be right in the world. 

Returning to the real world from those sweet daydreams is more painful than anything Dick has ever experienced.


	20. Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's song: Fix You by Boyce Avenue, Tyler Ward. (Originally by Coldplay, but I like the feel of this version better.) (Playlist can be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/kajnsn/playlist/796vN4CzQmr7lc3ugl1kQ3).)
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: Implied internalized homophobia.
> 
> Hello again everyone! Thanks for putting up with my long absences. <3 Here's some fluff and humor to balance out the angst of the last chapter!

  
During one of the weekly acrobatics sessions with Damian, Dick notices that he seems somewhat… off. He is quieter than usual and appears distracted, which is not something that can usually be said about the ordinarily hyper-focused Damian Wayne. 

Dick wipes his brow and takes a sip from his water bottle. “Something on your mind?” 

Damian’s lip thins as he frowns, and he completes another successful flip on the high bar. The frown is such a small movement that if Dick hadn’t spent so much time with Damian, he would not have noticed it - and yet, there it was. He lifts an eyebrow and speaks again. “So, that’s a yes. What’s up? You know you can talk to me about anything. I won’t judge you.” 

Damian does that tongue-clicking thing that he does when he’s irritated. “I should hope not, considering the fact that you spent several months as a harlot.” 

Ouch. Dick frowns. “Who told you about that?” 

Damian still avoids eye contact. “I overheard you and Black Canary talking.” 

“Oh.” 

It takes a moment for Damian to respond. His eyes fall to his feet and he looks sheepish. He drops down from the high bar to sit on the floor next to Dick. “I… apologize, Grayson. I understand that it is a sensitive subject. I should not have addressed it in such a flippant manner.” 

Dick can’t help but chuckle at Damian’s formal language. “It’s okay, Dami. Don’t worry about it. Just tell me what’s bothering you. You’ll feel better once you’ve talked about it.” 

Damian is still avoiding eye contact. “You… you were intimate with men, weren’t you? In Metropolis?” 

Dick frowns again. “…Yes. Why?” 

“I… I was wondering… what is it like?” 

This is the last question that Dick is expecting. He honestly isn’t even sure what to tell the boy. He’s fifteen, so he’s old enough for the sex talk, but… he needs to know why he’s asking before he divulges too much. “You have to tell me why you’re asking first.” 

Damian’s lips thin again as he glowers, but it has no effect on Dick – at this point in their relationship, Dick can see it for what it really is: pouting. After a moment, he relented. “There…. might be a boy… for whom I harbor affection.” 

“Might be?” Dick asks, holding back his squeal of glee that _Damian has a crush!_ , but allows a smile to slip through. “Who is he?” 

“Nobody,” Damian protests. 

“You don’t even go to school, so how did you meet him?” Dick’s eyes sparkle. “Is he another vigilante?” 

Damian glares. “Swear you will never tell.” Dick makes a zipper motion across his lips. “Fine. It’s…. Superboy.” 

Dick’s jaw drops. “ _Connor_? Isn’t he a little old for you?” 

Damian snorts. “No, not Kon-El. The clone has since given up the mantle of Superboy. I still see him frequently though; he visits the Kent farm with distressing regularity.” 

Dick files away the news of Connor’s retirement for later. “So… who is it?” 

“…Jonathan Kent.” 

“Jonathan… Kent? Superman’s _son_?” 

Damian responds stiffly. “Yes.” 

“…Oh,” Dick answers lamely. “Okay. Well. Does he like you back?” 

Damian puts his head in his hands. “I don’t know, Grayson. I honestly haven’t asked.” 

Dick puts his arm around the sulking teen. “What’s holding you back?” 

Damian takes a while to respond. “Is it… is it… wrong? To be with a man in such a way?” 

Dick’s gaze snaps up to meet Damian’s. He can see shame burning across his face, so he takes Damian by the shoulders and stares into his eyes. “Damian, of all of the countless evils I have witnessed in the world, love between two people has never been one of them.” 

The younger boy nods, but his silence and worried brow show his anxiety nonetheless. 

Dick shakes his head in disbelief. “What on earth makes you think it isn’t okay?” 

“I had… never been exposed to… two men loving each other the way a man and a woman do. It was never… it wasn’t a part of my… tutelage.” 

Oh. Ras. Of course. “Yeah. Probably a little too liberal for Ras’s tastes.” 

“Tt. I suppose.” 

“So….” Dick smiles mischievously and bumps against his shoulder. “How’d you meet him?” 

Damian blushes. “Must we gossip like schoolchildren?” 

“Yes.” 

He sighs in a very put-upon fashion, but relents easily. “Fine. I had started to detect strange energy patterns and my surveillance indicated that Superman’s son had begun to develop powers of his own. He accidentally incinerated a domestic feline and an endangered hawk out of surprise. So, I took him back to one of father’s fortresses to perform some tests.” 

Dick cocks an eyebrow. “And when you say you ‘took him’?” 

“I believe the term they use in the United States is ‘kidnapping’,” he says with a trace of a smirk. 

Dick lets out a low whistle. “We need to work on your social skills. You can’t kidnap people to make friends.” 

“I wasn’t trying to make friends!” Damian protests. “I was trying to ensure the safety of the planet! Running around with unchecked and untested powers can be dangerous, Grayson! I was doing my duty as Robin before-” 

“ _Okay_ , okay, fine. What happened next?” 

“Superman found me – that was a lapse of judgement on my part; I had forgotten that he could single out Jon’s heartbeat and track him. Anyway. Jon and I ended up fighting in the fortress because he couldn’t handle my insults, and our fathers forced us to participate in some bizarre boot camp that they used as a pretense for initiating a friendship between the two of us. They took our capes until we learned to get along.” 

Dick snickers. Damian glares. 

“After that, we became partners. We went on patrol together a few times and then, much to my chagrin, we became friends.” 

“Where do the two of you stand now?” 

“I am not sure I understand your meaning.” 

“I mean, how close are the two of you?” 

“He knows my secret identity. I obviously know his, but that’s not a surprise. I figured it out before we even met.” 

“And do you see him often?” 

“Yes. I just spent five days there last week.” 

… _Oh_. So _that’s_ what Jason meant on Dick’s first day at the manor. When Tim had asked if Damian would be okay staying at a friend’s house for a few days, Jason had said Damian ‘has a soft spot for the pipsqueak’. Jon must be the aforementioned pipsqueak. 

“Ahhh. So you were staying at your _boyfriend’s_ house?” Dick teases. 

“He’s _not_ my boyfriend!” 

“Not yet, anyway.” Damian glares at Dick’s smirk. “Seriously, though – do you think he likes you back?” 

“I don’t know, Grayson.” The blush on Damian’s face returns. “He certainly does appear to initiate physical contact with alarming frequency.” 

Dick wiggles his eyebrows, and Damian’s blush deepens. “What kind of physical contact?” 

“Hugs,” he admits begrudgingly. “And he likes to sit irritatingly close to me while we recline on the couch in his living room. And…” Damian’s blush grew even darker, “He kissed me on the cheek once.” 

Dick tries his best not to giggle. “I think it’s safe to say that he likes you, Dami. Why don’t you invite him over to the manor some time? We can have a movie night.” 

Damian glowers. “You won’t say anything to him?” 

“I swear, I won’t.” 

“Or to our brothers. Or our father. I would loathe to see the way Jason responds.” 

Dick can’t help but grin. Jason pretty much already knows, but Damian doesn’t need to know that. Not yet, anyway. “Of course not, Damian. Your secret is safe with me.” 

After a moment, Damian manages a tiny smile. “Thank-you, Grayson.” 

  
At dinner time, Bruce enters the dining room with his usual dramatic flair - all that is missing is the flowing cape behind him. He carries a brightly colored box in his hands and cuts right to the chase. “Tim, why were there condoms in your room?” 

Tim doesn’t even look up from his laptop to question why Bruce had searched through his bedroom. “Do you really need me to explain the purpose of condoms to you, Bruce?” 

Bruce gives him his patented bat-glare, which Tim appears to sense, because his gaze flits from his laptop screen to Bruce’s scowl and he lets out a put-upon sigh. “They’re to practice safe sex.” 

At this point, Jason can’t contain his muffled laughter behind his hand anymore. “And just how much practice are you getting there, Timbo?” 

Tim’s gaze fixes upon Jason’s smirking face and he asks, without missing a beat, “Are there still condoms left in that box?” 

Apparently too shocked to fight back, Bruce glances inside the box. “Yes.” 

Still staring directly into Jason’s eyes, Tim deadpans, “Not enough, then.” 

Bruce squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, probably mentally deleting the entire conversation he just witnessed, and he eventually sighs and drops the box of condoms on the table in defeat. “At least you won’t be getting anyone pregnant.” 

Because Jason lives to cause trouble, his smirk grows larger. “Oh don’t worry, B. Even without the condom, I don’t think Tim needs to worry about knocking up Connor.” He reaches across the table, pinches Tim’s cheek for effect, and then sprints out of the room before Tim can take a swipe at him. 

Bruce is alternating between flushing bright red and going inhumanly pale, and if Dick didn’t know any better, he would say that Bruce _whined_ with his next sentence. “Why did it have to be the Kryptonian? Isn’t there another nice boy somewhere that you could date instead that _isn’t_ related to Superman?” 

Tim returns to typing away on his laptop, completely unaffected by the awkward conversation around him. “If it makes you feel better, B, we aren’t dating.” 

“But you’re…?” 

“Having sex, yes.” 

Damian makes that clicking sound with his tongue that he’s so fond of. “Harlot.” Tim just rolls his eyes in response. 

Dick frowns. “Wait a minute – you’re sleeping with Connor? Does M’Gann know about this?” 

Tim cocks an eyebrow and grins and poorly conceals a smirk. “Of course. She’s a frequent participant in our encounters.” 

Bruce slumps down into his chair and puts his head in his hands, and Dick laughs – full-throated and so hard that he shakes in his chair. “I’m so proud of you, Timbo. You grew up so fast.” 

Damian gives Dick a withering look and ascends from the table. “I’m going to go to my room. This conversation has turned much too uncivilized for my tastes.” 

“’Uncivilized’, says the kid who tried to stab me with a fork _at this very table_ not even two hours ago,” Tim mutters. Damian kicks at the foot of his chair in retaliation and Tim just shakes his head as Damian disappears up the stairs. 

After a moment of silence, Bruce speaks up again. “Dick.” 

“Yeah, B?” 

“Why did it have to be the Kryptonian?” 

Dick laughs freely, sparing a glace towards the stairs where Damian had just exited the room. “You’re going to have to get over your rivalry with Clark at some point. You never know who could end up dating one of the Supers.” 

Bruce shivers in horror. “God forbid Damian date Kara Zor-El. Keep him away from her, won’t you?” 

Dick bites his lip hard enough to draw blood to prevent himself from laughing as he remembers the conversation with Damian the night before. “I don’t think that will be a problem, B.” 

“Good,” he replies. He pushes off of the table and stalks away as he mutters, “Too many Kryptonians around here lately… I don’t care _who_ my boys date as long as it’s not one of them. I do NOT want to be legally related to Clark Kent…” 

Deciding that this opportunity is far too good to pass up, Dick immediately whips out his phone and texts Jason what Bruce had just said. 

Thirty seconds later, he hears Jason laughing all the way from his room upstairs. 

  
After Damian’s conversation with Dick about Jon, Damian appears to warm up to him even more. He frequently seeks him out in the manor – sometimes he just sits by Dick in silence and reads a book, and sometimes he requests to spar. A few days after their conversation about Jon, Damian finds him down in the gym. Damian swings down to Dick’s level. “I am left to the unfortunate role of Oracle tonight. As much as I’d rather be on patrol, it appears that I am stuck. Would you care to join me?” 

Dick turns to him and smiles, rising up to his full height from where he had been crouched and hitting the heavy bag. He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. “I’d love to for a bit, but I can’t say up late. I’ve got my session with Dinah in the morning.” 

Damian purses his lips and his eyes narrow. He appears to be weighing something in his mind. “Why do you call her that?” 

“What? Dinah?” 

“Yes. It implies a certain level of familiarity.” 

“I’ve known her for a long time, Damian.” 

“All the same. You should refer to her as Black Canary.” 

“Why? Does it bother you?” 

“It feels… disrespectful. She outranks us. Shouldn’t you be calling her by her real name?” 

Pursing his lips, Dick frowns. “Dinah _is_ her real name.” 

“Tt. No. Black Canary is her real name. She is a _superhero_ , Grayson, and you should treat her as such.” 

Dick smiles as he catches on to his meaning. “Damian, believe me – I respect her. She’s the one who had the biggest hand in my training, second only to Batman himself. I have _immense_ respect for her. She is an amazing superhero, and she’s kicked my ass more times than I could even bother to count. But she’s also a human being.” 

He frowns and narrows his eyes. “And?” 

“And… when you’ve been doing this as long as we have, it becomes more disrespectful _not_ to acknowledge the human under the mask.” 

He looks unconvinced. “I suppose.” 

Dick pauses, considering how to best explain it. “It’s easy to get lost in your superhero identity and forget that you’re a real person when you spend too long behind the mask. You forget that you are human, underneath everything else, and you need other people around you. You need love.” 

Damian looks skeptical, but nods anyway. “So, she would prefer I address her as Dinah?” 

Dick smiles. “Yes, I believe she would.” 

Damian looks unconvinced – but, Dick notices with silent glee, the next time she comes to the manor, Damian calls her “Dinah”.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God, do I love writing Tim's dry sarcasm. Slut!Tim is my favorite.


	21. Chapter 21

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's song: "Leave Out All The Rest" by Linkin Park.
> 
> I WILL finish this fic. This is NOT an abandoned work. More chapters are coming, I promise. I'm doing much better than I was. Self-care is soooo important, and I think I finally hit my stride.

 

“They miss you, you know.”

Dick startles out of his reverie. “Who?”

Black Canary gives him a kind smile. “The team, Dick. They miss you. They’ve been asking about you.”

Dick shuffles in his seat. He’s not sure he’s ready to see them, but he’s also not sure how much of that is cowardice. “They’re not mad at me?”

“At this point, Dick, they’re just happy that you’re back and that you’re safe.”

He considers this. “Do you think it’s time for me to face them?”

“I think it is,” Dinah answers. “It’s time, Dick. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you’re putting it off out of fear, which is legitimate. You’re allowed to be afraid. But that’s not going to resolve itself if you wait. The only way you will overcome that fear is if you go see them.”

Damnit. She’s right. “Okay. I… I will. When should I go? And where are they?”

“Mount Justice.”

Dick startles. “That’s not possible, I… I blew up Mount Justice almost two years ago.”

“Between the efforts of Martian Manhunter, Megan, Connor, and Superman, they put everything back together, Dick. They even installed the latest Justice League technology.”

He wants to laugh. He wants to cry. He wants to jump up and down and collapse into his chair. “You’re serious? It’s… it’s fixed?”

“Yes, Dick. It’s fixed. It’s ready for you whenever you are ready to visit.”

Tears fill his eyes and he feels ten times lighter. “First thing tomorrow, I'm there.”

 

 

“RECOGNIZED – NIGHTWING B-01.”

As he hears the Zeta tube announce his presence, he inhales sharply and his knees shake. There is something so concrete about hearing that sound again. It sends him internally vaulting back to two years ago, the last time he had been in this very place. He nervously adjusts the sleeve to his Nightwing uniform. It had been so long since he’d donned it, and it fit a little differently now – his body is clearly a different shape than it used to be – but it still feels good and solid against his skin. It gives him a small bit if comfort to wear his armor.

As he looks around the room, he recognizes small things that are different. The furniture is different now, and the communicator screens are larger. The technology in the cave looks sleeker. Newer. More advanced. There is a second fridge now, too – probably due to Bart’s appetite, he thinks with a chuckle. But other than that, little has changed. It’s like stepping into the past.

And then, he hears rapid footsteps approaching and the blast from the past continues. For half of a crushing second, he thinks it’s Wally running to him at the sound of the Zeta tube announcing his name, bubbling over with excitement about that day’s mission like he had so many times before – and then he hears the figure cry out, “Nightwing’s back! _Crash_!” as the speedster comes to an abrupt halt a few feet away.

Seeing someone else in the Kid Flash uniform sends him reeling. He forcefully regulates his breathing by counting in for four seconds and out for four seconds and fixes what he hopes is a convincing smile on his face. “Hey, Bart. It’s good to see you.”

Jaime walked into the room, still in his full Blue Beetle costume, and stopped next to Bart. “Nightwing. You’re back. Where have you been?”

“That’s… a complicated question,” he answers carefully.

Jaime puts a hand on his shoulder. “Doesn’t matter. Regardless of where you’ve been, I’m glad you’re back, hermano.”

He returns Jaime’s smile. “Where’s the rest of the team?”

“Training room,” Bart answers. “Follow me!”

He zooms off.

“You’d think I’d be used to that by now,” Nightwing chuckles, and he and Jaime set off in Bart’s tracks.

“We’ve been dating for a year and I’m _still_ not used to it.”

Dick startles. “You’re dating?”

Jaime’s eyes widen behind his mask. “I… Yeah? Is that not allowed?”

Nightwing shakes his head. “No no no, it’s absolutely allowed. I’m happy for you guys. I’m not even surprised, to be honest with you; I always thought there was something between you two. I just sometimes forget that life goes on when I’m gone.” He smiles kindly. “I wish I could have been there to see it finally happen. You’ll have to tell me that story some time.”

Jaime visibly relaxes. “Claro que si. But for now, the rest of the team needs to see you. They’ve been worried.”

 

When Dick sees Artemis for the first time in two years, he can’t help but hate her. He doesn’t know what he expected to see in her when he saw her again. Tears, maybe. Frown lines. A changed personality.

What he doesn’t expect, however, is for her to be standing there, leaning up against Kaldur, looking ever-so-fucking _happy_.

He sees red.

She’s not even looking at him – hasn’t even noticed he’s there – but he glares at her.

Dick is still alive, but he’s barely breathing most of the time. He’s falling to pieces. He struggles to sleep. But Artemis? She’s engaged to another man. Artemis, who had Wally, who had everything Dick has ever wanted, is smiling and standing there and engaged to another man.

It doesn’t seem fair. The heartbreak should be a little more evenly distributed, he thinks as he sees Artemis beam and say something to Kaldur.

They’re across the room watching Black Canary teach Damian along with a tiny kid with the Superman logo on his uniform, and Dick is so focused on the fire within him that he doesn’t notice Miss Martian approaching.

Then, he feels a tendril reaching into his mind – an alien feeling, yet so familiar – and for a moment, he forgets how to accept the intrusion and just brushes up against it, testing the familiarity of it all. Then, he unlocks his mind and allows Miss Martian to flood into his brain.

He dissolves into tears as he lets it all gush out of him just as Miss Martian physically embraces him.

He doesn’t even know why he’s crying, really. Being back in the cave – something he never thought he’d do again – is devastating. The sights, the sounds, the once-familiar people. It is all just so overwhelming.

But Miss Martian - wonderful, kind, loving Miss Martian, still embracing him warmly - mentally lifts up his emotions as if shouldering some of their weight, and Dick can finally breathe again. He shudders out a shaky exhale and reaches up to clutch M’Gann’s forearms.

“Thank-you,” he says hoarsely.

“I had no idea you were hurting so much,” she murmurs just loudly enough for him to hear.

“It comes and goes,” he responds just as quietly.

At this point, they’ve caused enough of a commotion that the rest of the team has noticed Dick, and they have several simultaneous reactions.

Damian tuts and says, “It’s about time he showed up.” The kid standing by Damian stands in slack-jawed awe, staring directly at him, which he files away to deal with at another time.

Kaldur and Artemis call out, simultaneously, “Nightwing!”

M’Gann pats him on the back reassuringly and gives him a little push towards the others, and he takes his cue and begins the short walk (that feels so much longer inside his head) to the others.

Kaldur was the first to reach him. He clapped Dick on the shoulder and exclaimed, “It’s so good to see you, my friend!” The warm cadence of his voice was reassuring in spite of the surrounding stress of the situation.

“Thanks, Kaldur. I missed you guys.”

Artemis reached him next. “Dick, I… I hope you’re doing okay.”

He decides then and there that now is not the time to figure out his anger towards Artemis, and certainly not the time to express it, so he swallows his pride and his anger and he forces a smile onto his face. “I’m doing alright.”

She places a hand on Kaldur’s forearm. “Just let us know if you need anything, okay?”

He nods stiffly and directs his attention behind the couple to Damian and the super-kid. “Hey, Damian.”

  
Without preamble, he responds, “Nightwing. It’s odd to see you here.”

“I was a part of this team before you even knew it existed,” Dick retorts with an ornery smile. “I helped found this team.”

A sparkle of respect enters his eyes. “I did not know that. That is… impressive.”

Dick ducks his head in thanks and turns his attention towards the gaping kid who stands next to him. “Who’s your friend?”

Dick instantly knew who he is based on Damian’s very brief facial expression of terror. “Nightwing, this is Superboy. Superboy, this is my brother Nightwing. I’ve told you about him.”

Jon lifts up off the ground to fly the few feet it takes to close the distance between them. “It’s really nice to meet you, Nightwing,” he sputters out. “Dami- I mean Robin - has told me a lot about you.”

“It’s nice to meet you too, Superboy,” he answers, his voice coming out even warmer than he intended. “I’m glad you’re here. Damian has told me a lot about you. Welcome to the team.”

“Thanks,” Jon manages, and Damian quickly ushers him away, presumably before Dick can say anything embarrassing.

Black Canary has been hovering in the background, watching the interactions take place. Dick approaches her once the others have wandered away. “Thank-you, Dinah.”

“No need to thank me.”

“Well. I’m thanking you anyway. I needed a push to come see the team, and I’m glad I came to see them.”

“Does this mean you’ll be rejoining us?”

“Eventually,” he says. “I need to get myself to the point where I am ready. Physically. And mentally, I guess. I haven’t even started patrolling in Gotham yet. I don’t think I’m quite mission-ready at the moment.”

“I’d agree with that,” she says gently. “You could join us for practice a couple of times per week though, if you’d like.”

He considers this. “I think I would,” he nods. “I think I’d like that a lot.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spanish translations:
> 
> Hermano = literal translation meaning "brother"; basically calling him "bro" or "dude"  
> Claro que si = of course/obviously
> 
> (I speak Spanish pretty well but I'm not a native speaker, so if you are a native speaker and my translations are incorrect, please let me know in a comment!)


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's song: "Alive" by Sia. (Playlist can be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/kajnsn/playlist/796vN4CzQmr7lc3ugl1kQ3).)

Unbeknownst to Dick, Wally watches the entire interaction between Dick and the rest of the team.

At first, Wally was excited that Dick was finally getting out of the house. Bruce had put him on house arrest when he had first returned home, partially at Dick’s own request, and Wally was thrilled at the idea of Dick finally getting out of the manor and even more so at the thought of Dick seeing their friends for the first time in two years.

Watching Artemis and Dick interact for the first time in two years, however, made Wally sick to his stomach.

He saw Dick’s facial expressions, and he can read him like a book even behind the mask. When Dick’s smile isn’t sincere, his eyes don’t crinkle up the same way they do when he means it. His dimples don’t grow quite as deep. His forehead creases with the mental strain of faking his feelings.

Wally can read him like a book. And Dick hates Artemis.

It hits Wally hard and leaves him breathless. The two people that he loves most in this world, and one of them hates the other.

And he doesn’t even know why.

He ponders it constantly over the next two weeks.

 

Dick Grayson had lived two lives.

The first one, his childhood, was in the circus. With his parents. With his family. Traveling, learning, moving. Laughing in the face of death, every night, with the most exquisite acrobatic performance on this side of the planet.

And his current life. He knew most people would consider him a child, and he passively allowed them to, but he knew better. He had seen too much, lost too much, for any sort of remnant of innocence to remain. He didn’t feel like a child anymore.

Throughout his entire current life, Wally West had been his best friend. He had met him at ten. Best friends by eleven. Inseparable by twelve. Joined a superhero team together by thirteen.

Most of Dick’s memories of his second life involved Wally.

He knows he needs to let Wally go. But he can’t. It’s just… they’ve got history.

They’ve known each other since they were kids. They grew up together, both in the normal teens-going-through-adolescence way and growing into their roles as superheroes. There isn’t much that can compete with that. They go way back.

There’s nothing that can replace that.

 

“You can kick harder. You aren’t going to hurt me.” Dick grunts and aims another kick towards Black Canary’s pelvis, which she easily deflects. “Use more force! I’m not made of glass!”

He reels back and aims another kick, already ashamed at how comparatively pathetic he is. He used to be able to keep up with Dinah. Not beat her, but he could hold his own. But now she’s making him look like he’s ten years old again, fresh out of the circus, using his enthusiasm and muscle mass from years of acrobatics practices to make up for his stark lack of fighting ability.

It’s embarrassing.

Sure, he’s been sparring with Jason and Roy, but they’ve clearly been taking it easy on him. Even scaled back to fifty percent effort, Black Canary is wiping the floor with him.

He aims a solid kick at her knees and internally congratulates himself on his form before flipping backwards to dodge her next strike. He feels his lips pull into a hopeful smile as he gets upright once again and aims another solid blow. Okay, not bad. This feels natural. Feels good, even, to use his muscle memory of attack-dodge-attack-dodge.

He still feels a bit like a child, but in a healing sort of way. Like he’s being taken care of for a change. Like he’s got someone looking out for him, so he can just live his life and do what he needs to do for himself rather than worrying about anything else.

“Alright, that’s enough.”

Dick relaxes out of his fighting stance and wipes the sweat from his forehead. “How’d I do?”

“You’ve improved a lot over the past two weeks, Dick. I can already see flashes of your old self. You’ll get back to where you were in no time.”

He gives her a genuine smile in return. “Thanks, Dinah.”

It’s comforting to return to something as familiar as training with Black Canary, which he had done all throughout his adolescence. He feels like he is starting over, in a way.

He’s started training with Black Canary immediately after they meet for therapy. It’s nice to do something so physical and so familiar after pouring his heart out during each session. It pulls his mind out of his misery and he stitches himself back together each time.

Dick jumps down from the platform and his gaze is drawn to the small gathering of teammates by the doorway. Damian, Jon, Tim, M’Gann, Connor, and Jason were conversing easily and ambling about. Connor called over, “Nightwing! We’re going to go out for ice cream. Want to go?”

He wipes more sweat off his forehead. That workout was intense “I’d love to, Connor, but I need to get back home. I’m still on Bruce-imposed house arrest.”

“Oh well,” Jason says. “I guess it’ll be a triple date this time.” Dick notes that both Damian and Tim’s faces turn bright red. Interesting. He files that away for later. “But you _have_ to come next time!”

“Still on house arrest, Jay,” Dick laughs.

Connor smiles warmly. “Whenever that changes, we should go out to celebrate. Go see a movie or something.”

“I haven’t seen a movie in two years,” Dick chuckles as he approaches the group. “I must have missed a lot.”

“One of these days, you’re going to tell me what you’ve been up to for the past two years. I can’t decide if it was a deep undercover mission gone wrong or if you just dropped off the grid.”

“A combination of both, really,” Dick responds after a moment.

“Well. You know I’m not good with feelings and stuff, but I’m here if you need me.”

Dick places a hand on his shoulder and smiles. “I know you are, Connor. And I appreciate it.”

 

During week five of his sobriety, Bruce pulls Dick aside after dinner one evening and presents him with a white box wrapped in a bow.

“What’s this?”

“Open it.”

Dick gives him an odd look. As generous as Bruce can be, it’s not like him to randomly give out gifts. Nonetheless, he unwraps the bow and slides the cardboard box open.

Inside of the box rests a cell phone. The newest model, if he’s not mistaken. He’s not even sure if this model is out in stores yet.

“Not that I’m not grateful, Bruce, because I am, but… what do I need this for?” Dick asked. “It’s not like I go anywhere other than the house and Mount Justice, and we’ve got comm systems all over both places.”

“I thought it was time that you get out and socialize with your friends,” Bruce replies kindly.

“Does… does this mean I’m off house arrest?”

“You’re ready, Dick,” he says. “Do you disagree?”

Dick ponders this for a moment before responding. “I am nervous to be on my own, Bruce. I am afraid I’ll mess up again.”

Bruce, in a surprising show of warmth, leans in and gives him a firm hug. “You will never be on your own,” he answers. “Not as long as you’re a part of this family.”

 

Dick is improving in leaps and bounds. Due to his intense training regimen, his physical health is almost back to where it used to be and his strength is growing every day. He trains with Jason and Roy three times a week, trains with Black Canary twice a week, and practices acrobatics with Damian once a week. He is pleased with his progress with each milestone achieved, whether it be a higher weight while lifting or adding an extra flip when practicing on the high bars. He’s feeling like his old self again, one step at a time.

His mental health, however, is stalling. He still hasn’t talked to anyone about his feelings for Wally or exactly how much his death has affected him.

 

Tim approaches Dick one evening and asks him to patrol with him that night.

“You’re ready, Dick,” he insists.

“Does Bruce think so?”

“I honestly haven’t asked him. I thought if I came to you first, we could go to him together and present our argument.”

“Which is?”

“That you’re back to peak physical condition and it’s time to get you back out in the field.” He pauses. “As long as that’s still what you want.”

“It definitely is. I guess I’m just worried that I’m not ready.”

Tim pats his shoulder in a reassuring manner. “You’re ready, man. Trust me. I wouldn’t be coming to you if you weren’t. I want you to patrol with me tonight. If I thought you’d be a hindrance, I’d much rather leave you behind.”

He considers this. “That’s definitely true. You’re the most analytical of all of us, Bruce included.” A beat passes. “Don’t tell him I said that.”

Tim pats his shoulder again. “He’s Batman. Somehow, I feel like he already knows.”

 

They approach Batman about it two nights later. Surprisingly to Dick (though unsurprisingly to Tim), he agrees and asks Dick if he feels he is ready. Dick says he is, if for no other reason than that he desperately needs something to do. His schedule had grown monotonous. He wasn’t used to being stagnant for this long.

So, Batman agrees – on one condition.

“You patrol with me tonight so I can evaluate your progress.”

Tim looks like he’s about to protest, but thinks better of it and closes his mouth.

“That’s fair,” Dick says. “Where are we patrolling?”

“Suit up,” Batman simply responds. “Then we’ll have a briefing before we go.”

 

The smog-filled Gotham air smells so comfortingly familiar to Dick. He perches on a rooftop, observing a group of rather seedy-looking individuals about twenty feet below. He knows Bruce isn’t far off, blending into the night like he does so well, waiting for the second group of thugs to arrive like Tim’s intel claims they will.

Sure enough, after a few minutes, Dick hears the telltale signs of hushed voices and footsteps from around the corner of his rooftop and a second group emerges.

Dick waits.

Just as the two groups converge on each other, Dick hears a swooping noise and Batman descends upon them.

That’s his cue.

Dick leaps, and his heart swells as he feels the open air rush through his hair and glide over his skin. HE can’t help but let out a little _whoop!_ as he flies through the air, gravity carrying him down, down, down, until he lands on the shoulders of a thug just as said thug starts to pull out his gun.

“Nope,” Dick chirps. “None of that, now. Don’t you know gun violence is a problem in this city?”

He promptly whirls around, kicking out his leg, connecting his foot with his would-be assailant’s head. The thug drops to the ground like a stone. The rest of them scatter amidst screams of, “Batman’s here!” “Nightwing’s back!”

It’s _immensely_ satisfying.

As the dust settles and he and Batman tie up the thugs that they were able to knock out, Bruce “hmmm”’s. Dick pauses. He knows that sound. It means he’s contemplating something.

“What?”

“You did good back there,” he says gruffly.

Dick waits for the caveat. “But…?”

“You’re a little stiff.”

He loosens his muscles. “Anything else?” He’s not being disrespectful and Bruce knows it. He knows how he works at this point. He knows he’s asking, not to be rude but out of a genuine desire to do better. And not just to DO better – to BE better. So, he responds in kind.

“Your knee was at an odd angle when you kicked that thug.  You’re gonna injure yourself that way.”

Now that he mentions it, his knee does twinge a little. “How did you possibly notice that? You were beating these guys into a pulp at the time!”

“World’s greatest detective,” he replies, and Dick swears he can hear Bruce’s grin behind his mask.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Leave me some love. My literal motivation to finish this fic is all of the comments and screaming from all of you lovely readers. <3

**Author's Note:**

> The media that we consume has a very real effect on our mental health. If you find that you are affected by this story long after you are done reading it, please take a break from it - as I had to do multiple times while writing it - and address the issue before you return. Whether that means adjusting meds, calling a friend or just listening to a silly song, please do what you need to do in order to keep yourself healthy. 
> 
> That being said, this story is already completely written, so I WILL be updating this story weekly. I spent literally four months writing this and I'm very proud of it, and I hope you like it too.
> 
> Q&A posts that I have done, if you are interested:  
> https://birdsgoflying.tumblr.com/post/163154970313/letting-go-fic-qa  
> https://birdsgoflying.tumblr.com/post/164949722093/letting-go-fic-qa-2
> 
> You can find me on Twitter @birdsgoflying. If you have a Twitter account, follow me there, because I will be providing updates/news about this story, as well as links to little extras for this verse. You don't need to be a silent follower, either - don't hesitate to reach out to me! I LOVE talking to fellow Birdflash fans!
> 
> Please leave me some feedback if you want to see this story continued! New updates will happen weekly as long as people are interested.


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